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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2026-55099 json

icalendar: Algorithmic Complexity in Equality

published 4mo ago modified 2mo ago also EUVD-2026-65743 , GHSA-cv84-9p8j-fj68 , PYSEC-2026-3851

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.6%
EPSS 0.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 50%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

icalendar is an RFC 5545 compatible parser and generator of iCalendar files for Python. From 7.1.0 until 7.1.3, the Component equality method in src/icalendar/cal/component.py compares nested subcomponents with two membership loops, and each membership test invokes the same method on child components, causing O(2^n) work relative to nesting depth. Component.from_ical accepts arbitrarily nested BEGIN:VEVENT blocks without a depth limit, so an attacker can submit a sub-kilobyte .ics file containing equal nested subtrees and trigger the cost when an application performs equality, inequality, membership, deduplication, test-assertion, round-trip, or normalization comparisons. Parsing alone does not trigger the issue, and comparisons that differ early short-circuit, but a few hundred bytes can pin a CPU core for minutes or indefinitely, causing denial of service in calendar sync or import endpoints, invite processing, and other comparison paths. This issue is fixed in version 7.1.3.

Patch / fix

Is CVE-2026-55099 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 50% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/collective/icalendar/security/advisories/GHSA-cv84-9p8j-fj68 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
GitHub 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
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
pypi icalendar
>=7.1.0, <7.1.3
7.1.3

Affected products

  • collective icalendar

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

References

Sources

Fencer Intel 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.

The maintainers of collective/icalendar published their own advisory on GitHub. Reviewed sources take precedence over it.