The trim and rtrim functions stripped trailing whitespace with s/\s*$//u. Because \s* matches greedily and the $ anchor fails whenever a non-whitespace character follows the whitespace, the regex engine retries the match at each offset of a long whitespace run, producing quadratic backtracking. The fix replaces \s*$ with \s+$.
Any caller that passes untrusted input to trim or rtrim can trigger CPU exhaustion with a string containing a long run of whitespace.
Default status is the baseline for the product, each version can override it (e.g. patched versions marked unaffected).
| Vendor | Product | Default status | Versions | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKERSCOT | String::Util | unaffected |
|
No data.
No data.
No data.
Project Subscriptions
No data.
No advisories yet.
Solution
Upgrade to version 1.36 or later.
Workaround
For deployments that cannot upgrade, enforce a maximum length on strings before passing them to the trim and rtrim functions. Note that the HTML form field maxlength attribute is only enforced client-side.
Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:45:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| Description | String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service. The trim and rtrim functions stripped trailing whitespace with s/\s*$//u. Because \s* matches greedily and the $ anchor fails whenever a non-whitespace character follows the whitespace, the regex engine retries the match at each offset of a long whitespace run, producing quadratic backtracking. The fix replaces \s*$ with \s+$. Any caller that passes untrusted input to trim or rtrim can trigger CPU exhaustion with a string containing a long run of whitespace. | |
| Title | String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-1333 | |
| References |
|
Projects
Sign in to view the affected projects.
MITRE
Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: CPANSec
Published:
Updated: 2026-07-08T00:28:33.750Z
Reserved: 2026-07-06T18:31:10.251Z
Link: CVE-2026-14895
Vulnrichment
No data.
NVD
No data.
Redhat
No data.
OpenCVE Enrichment
No data.