Regular expression denial of service in Date-Manip
Key facts
- Attack vector
- Network
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Impact type
- Denial of service
- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
- None · None · High
- Fix status
- Partial Red Hat: 3 fixed, 2 without a fix
Attack profile from CVSS 3.1 · CISA ADP. Fix status from CNA and Red Hat. Impact type from CWE-1333.
Summary
Date::Manip versions through 7.00 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic backtracking in the unanchored time substitution in _parse_time. _parse_time removes a time from anywhere in the string with the unanchored substitution `s/$timerx/ /`, where $timerx is an auto-generated alternation of time patterns reached through a leading `(?:$atrx|^|\s+)`. The engine therefore retries the match at every position of an interior whitespace run: at each start position the leading `\s+` consumes the rest of the run greedily, the time alternation fails because the run holds no digits, and the engine backtracks a space at a time across the run before advancing the start position, which is quadratic in the length of the run. No time need be present in the string for this to happen, only a long run of whitespace, and the parse time rises about fourfold for each doubling of the run: a few kilobytes of whitespace costs seconds of CPU per parse and tens of kilobytes costs minutes. Any caller that passes an untrusted string of unbounded length to ParseDate(), Date::Manip::Date->parse() or ->parse_time() can be made to spend unbounded CPU in a single parse, a denial of service.
Why it matters now
SSVC decision points
CISA ADP · SSVC 2.0.3
- Exploitation
- None
- Automatable
- Yes
- Technical impact
- Partial
The decision (Track, Attend, Act) also depends on your mission and well-being impact; see CISA's SSVC guide.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected versions | Fixed in | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | Date-Manip | up to 7.00 | — | No fix listed | CNA |
- Date-Manip Vendor— Affected up to 7.00 Fixed in — No fix listed CNA
Remediation
Red Hat 3 advisories
- RHSA-2026:57562 Released 2026-08-20 · Red Hat rating Importantperl-Date-Manip security update
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux BaseOS (v. 8) perl-Date-Manip-6.60-3.el8_10.1
- RHSA-2026:56970 Released 2026-08-19 · Red Hat rating Importantperl-Date-Manip security update
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream (v. 9) perl-Date-Manip-6.85-3.el9_8.1
- RHSA-2026:56971 Released 2026-08-19 · Red Hat rating Importantperl-Date-Manip security update
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream (v. 10) perl-Date-Manip-6.94-5.el10_2.1
Vendor assessments
Red Hat
Red Hat rating: Important. Red Hat's page for this CVE →
| Product | Status | Plan or fix |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | Affected | No fix planned: Out of support scope |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 | Affected | No fix yet |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream (v. 10) | Fixed | RHSA-2026:56971 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream (v. 9) | Fixed | RHSA-2026:56970 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux BaseOS (v. 8) | Fixed | RHSA-2026:57562 |
Timeline
- 2026-10-02 Threatist record created from CVE-2026-60075
- 2026-10-03 Alias added: GHSA-6w78-p685-p2f6
- 2026-10-14 Priority changed: MEDIUM → LOW
References
Sources
- CVE-2026-60075 · CVE Program
- CVE-2026-60075 · NVD
- FIRST EPSS
- GHSA-6w78-p685-p2f6 · GitHub Advisory Database · CC BY 4.0
- CVE-2026-60075 · Red Hat security data · CC BY 4.0
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