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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

HSEC-2026-0011 json

Superlinear encoding of numbers with large coefficients

published 2026-11-03 5 d ago modified 2026-11-03 5 d ago

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, OSV
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
—
no score, EPSS covers CVEs only
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

# Superlinear encoding of numbers with large coefficients

Encoding (pretty-printing) a `Scientific` number whose coefficient has many digits took time quadratic in the number of digits: the decimal digits were extracted by repeatedly dividing the whole coefficient by 10, once per digit. The `Show` instance, `Data.Text.Lazy.Builder.Scientific` and `Data.ByteString.Builder.Scientific` — which `aeson` uses to encode JSON numbers — all share this code path. A number with one million digits took about a minute to show, and about a tenth of a second after the fix.

This is a denial-of-service risk for applications that decode numbers from an untrusted source and encode them again, e.g. JSON proxies, loggers or API gateways built on `aeson`.

## Resolution

`scientific-0.3.9.0` reimplemented `normalize` and `toDecimalDigits` (the digit-extraction primitive) to be practically linear in the coefficient size.

Note that `scientific-0.3.9.0` introduced a regression of its own; see HSEC-2026-0012. Upgrade directly to `scientific-0.3.10.0` or later, which fixes both issues.

## Credits

Reported by Andrzej Rybczak (@arybczak); fixed by Oleg Grenrus (@phadej).

Patch / fix

  • hackage scientific 0.3.9.0

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
OSV 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
hackage scientific
<0.3.9.0
0.3.9.0

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.