Vulnerability · Published Sep 21, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-59168Dasel: Unbounded recursion in JSON and XML readers causes unrecoverable stack-overflow DoS
Medium 6.2
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in dasel from TomWright. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 3% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.
Official description
Dasel is a command-line tool and library for querying, modifying, and transforming data structures. From 3.0.0 until 3.11.1, parsing/json/json_reader.go decodeValue, decodeObject, and decodeArray, and parsing/xml/reader.go parseElement, recurse once per input nesting level without a depth guard. Deeply nested attacker-controlled JSON or XML supplied through parsing.Format(...).NewReader(...).Read(data), the command-line interface, or the parse selector function can exhaust the Go goroutine stack and raise an unrecoverable fatal error that terminates the entire process. The XML input-size limit does not prevent depth exhaustion, and defer or recover cannot intercept the failure. This issue is fixed in version 3.11.1.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian:14 | dasel | 3.11.2-1 | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-59168 |
| Go | github.com/tomwright/dasel | no fix listed | GO-2026-6549 |
| Go | github.com/tomwright/dasel/v2 | no fix listed | GO-2026-6549 |
| Go | github.com/tomwright/dasel/v3 | 3.11.1 | GHSA-cqxr-jxr2-85pq |
| Go | github.com/tomwright/dasel/v3 | 3.11.1 | GO-2026-6549 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | dasel | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-59168 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | dasel | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-59168 |
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-674 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
References
- https://github.com/TomWright/dasel/security/advisories/GHSA-cqxr-jxr2-85pq x_refsource_CONFIRM
- https://github.com/TomWright/dasel/commit/4c91d0d02dc59ce8404709b1bfed7a6fabe62f68 x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/TomWright/dasel/releases/tag/v3.11.1 x_refsource_MISC