CVE-2026-72912 CyberChef’s pretty-recipe parser vulnerable to client-side ReDoS / CPU exhaustion when parsing a malformed #recipe= URL
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-72912?
CVE-2026-72912 is a medium-severity vulnerability in gchq CyberChef, published on 10 Aug 2026.
Official description
CyberChef is a web app for encryption, encoding, compression, and data analysis. Prior to 11.3.0, CyberChef's pretty-recipe parser in src/core/Utils.mjs can exhaust client-side CPU when a malformed #recipe= URL fragment containing a large number of unmatched quote characters reaches Utils.parseRecipeConfig(). The function synchronously applies a complex global regular expression that may perform heavy backtracking before rejecting the input, causing the victim's browser tab to freeze during startup for seconds or longer. No code execution, data exfiltration, or privilege escalation occurs. This issue is fixed in version 11.3.0.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-72912?
How do I fix CVE-2026-72912?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-72912 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2026-72912 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-72912 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-w74r-jxjh-gwr6.