VulnerabilityAwaiting Analysis

CVE-2026-61629

A single unauthenticated GET request with an `Accept-Language` header built out of `_` separators burns about 2.4 seconds of server CPU on the host running nginx-ignition; ten concurrent attackers saturate a ten-core box for the duration of the attack…

HIGH 7.5EPSS 0.42%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.42%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

nginx ignition is a user interface for the nginx web server. In versions 2.29.0 through 2.40.0, the gin i18n middleware in nginx-ignition's API server runs in front of every HTTP request and calls `golang.org/x/text/language.ParseAcceptLanguage` on the raw `Accept-Language` header without imposing any size or shape filter. The underlying parser has quadratic-time behaviour on long lists of malformed language tags. The CVE-2022-32149 guard that golang.org/x/text added in v0.3.8 caps the number of `-` characters in the input at 1000, but it does not cap `_` characters even though the parser's internal scanner aliases `_` to `-` before parsing. A single unauthenticated GET request with an `Accept-Language` header built out of `_` separators burns about 2.4 seconds of server CPU on the host running nginx-ignition; ten concurrent attackers saturate a ten-core box for the duration of the attack while consuming ~10 MiB/s of upstream bandwidth. Version 2.40.1 fixes this issue.

CVSS 3.1: 7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS: 0.42% probability · 36th percentile
Public exploits: None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-770
Source: security-advisories@github.com

EPSS trend

EPSS moved from 0.4% on 22 September 2026 to 0.4% on 26 October 2026.

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.