Summary
Pydantic AI: Event loop blocked by quadratic title extraction in web_fetch
The local web-fetch tool (web_fetch_tool, also used as the WebFetch capability's local fallback) processed responses with several steps whose running time grows quadratically with the size of certain server-controlled inputs, and ran them on the event loop: decoding the body with whichever charset the server declared, extracting the page title with a backtracking regular expression, and converting the HTML to markdown. An application that exposes this tool to untrusted prompts can be steered to fetch an attacker-controlled page of a megabyte or two that blocks the event loop for minutes, stalling every other coroutine in the process, other agent runs, other requests being served, for the duration.
This is an availability issue only. SSRF protections and the download size limit introduced in GHSA-v2xh-2vp8-57h8 are unaffected; that limit bounds how much is downloaded, not how long the response takes to process.
Details
Title extraction used a backtracking pattern over the raw response body, so a body made of repeated unterminated tag openings cost time proportional to the square of its size. The HTML-to-markdown conversion had the same shape in three of its steps: normalizing whitespace, stripping preformatted blocks, and numbering ordered lists all took time proportional to the square of a run of spaces or a list's length. All of it ran on the event loop, and the regex steps hold the interpreter lock even when moved off it, so the whole process paid for the size of a server-controlled response.
The response body was also decoded on the event loop with the codec named by the charset parameter of the response's Content-Type, looked up in Python's codec registry. That registry includes punycode, whose decoder takes time proportional to the square of its input: a response of about one megabyte labelled charset=punycode blocked the event loop for roughly half a minute, with no HTML required. The registry also includes codecs that aren't text encodings at all, such as rot_13 and base64_codec; a response labelled with one of those raised an unexpected exception out of the tool, aborting the agent run that fetched it.
Separately, the HTML-to-markdown conversion recursed once per nested element, so a page nested a few hundred elements deep raised a RecursionError out of the tool, aborting the agent run that fetched it. A JSON response nested deeper than the interpreter allows did the same. These only affect that one run.
Who Is Affected
You are affected if your application registers the local web-fetch tool (or relies on the WebFetch capability's local fallback) and exposes the agent to untrusted prompts. allowed_domains narrows the exposure to pages on those domains but does not remove it. Applications that only fetch developer-controlled URLs are not exposed to the model-chosen attack path.
Credits
Reported privately by @BrianWillows, whose report covered the quadratic title extraction. The response decoding, the codecs that are not text encodings, and the quadratic steps in the HTML-to-markdown conversion were found while fixing it.
Impact
A regular expression with worst-case exponential or polynomial matching time is applied to untrusted input, causing excessive CPU use. Typical impact: denial of service when input is crafted to trigger backtracking.
CVE-2026-107290 has a CVSS score of 6.5 (Medium). The vector is network-reachable, low privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (1.107.6, 2.44.0); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.
Affected versions
Security releases
Kodem intelligence
Severity tells you how bad this could be in the worst case. It does not tell you whether you are exposed. Exploitability and impact are functions of runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A vulnerable package can sit in your dependency tree and never run.
Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter. Kodem's runtime-powered SCA identifies whether this CVE is reachable in your applications.
Already deployed Kodem?
See it in your environmentNew to Kodem? Get a demo →Remediation advice
Upgrade to a patched version. The title is now found with a single linear scan, the conversion steps above run in linear time, and decoding, title extraction and conversion all run in a worker thread. A charset naming a codec that isn't a text encoding, and a page too deeply nested to convert, are reported back to the model as a failed fetch instead of aborting the run; a JSON body too deeply nested to parse is returned as plain text.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is CVE-2026-107290? CVE-2026-107290 is a medium-severity inefficient regular expression (ReDoS) vulnerability in pydantic-ai (pip), affecting versions >= 1.77.0, < 1.107.6. It is fixed in 1.107.6, 2.44.0. A regular expression with worst-case exponential or polynomial matching time is applied to untrusted input, causing excessive CPU use.
- How severe is CVE-2026-107290? CVE-2026-107290 has a CVSS score of 6.5 (Medium). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
- Which packages are affected by CVE-2026-107290?
pydantic-ai(pip) (versions >= 1.77.0, < 1.107.6)pydantic-ai-slim(pip) (versions >= 1.77.0, < 1.107.6)
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-107290? Yes. CVE-2026-107290 is fixed in 1.107.6, 2.44.0. Upgrade to this version or later.
- Is CVE-2026-107290 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2026-107290 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
- What actually determines whether CVE-2026-107290 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
- How do I fix CVE-2026-107290?
- Upgrade
pydantic-aito 1.107.6 or later - Upgrade
pydantic-aito 2.44.0 or later - Upgrade
pydantic-ai-slimto 1.107.6 or later - Upgrade
pydantic-ai-slimto 2.44.0 or later
- Upgrade