CVE-2026-7040

High

Published: 27 April 2026

Published

27 April 2026

Modified

07 May 2026

KEV Added

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Patch

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CVSS Score 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS Score 0.0005 15.4th percentile

Risk Priority 15 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2026-7040 is a high-severity Heap-based Buffer Overflow (CWE-122) vulnerability in Rrwo Text\. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 15.4th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SI-10 (Information Input Validation) and SI-2 (Flaw Remediation).

Threat & Defense at a Glance

What attackers do: exploitation maps to Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004). What defenders deploy: see the NIST 800-53 controls recommended below.

Threat & Defense Details

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI

SI-2 Flaw Remediation good match

prevent

SI-2 requires timely identification, reporting, and correction of software flaws like the heap overflow in Text::Minify::XS, directly enabling patching to version 0.7.8.

SI-10 Information Input Validation good match

prevent

SI-10 mandates validation of information inputs to ensure consistency with expected formats, preventing heap corruption by rejecting malformed UTF-8 characters before processing in minify functions.

SI-16 Memory Protection partial match

prevent

SI-16 implements memory protection mechanisms that mitigate heap overflows by restricting unauthorized memory access and modification during malformed UTF-8 processing.

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI

T1499.004 Application or System Exploitation Impact

Adversaries may exploit software vulnerabilities that can cause an application or system to crash and deny availability to users.

attack.mitre.org →

Why these techniques?

Heap overflow in Perl module enables remote crafted input to crash the application, directly facilitating T1499.004 Application or System Exploitation for DoS.

Confidence: HIGH · MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v18.1

NVD Description

Text::Minify::XS versions from 0.3.0 before 0.7.8 for Perl have a heap overflow when processing some malformed UTF-8 characters. The minify functions mishandled some malformed UTF-8 characters, leading to heap corruption. Note that the minify_utf8 function is an alias for minify.

Deeper analysisAI

CVE-2026-7040 is a heap overflow vulnerability in the Text::Minify::XS Perl module, affecting versions from 0.3.0 up to but not including 0.7.8. The issue stems from the minify functions mishandling certain malformed UTF-8 characters, resulting in heap corruption. Note that minify_utf8 is an alias for the minify function. The vulnerability is classified under CWE-122 (Heap-based Buffer Overflow) and CWE-176 (Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding), with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).

A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability over the network with low attack complexity and no user interaction required. By providing crafted input containing malformed UTF-8 characters to the affected minify functions, the attacker can trigger heap corruption, leading to a denial-of-service condition through application crashes or instability, though no confidentiality or integrity impacts are possible.

Mitigation is available in Text::Minify::XS version 0.7.8, as documented in the release changes on MetaCPAN. The GitHub security advisory (GHSA-jqhf-vv4h-77h2) provides further details on the vulnerability, and it was publicly disclosed on the oss-security mailing list on 2026-04-27. Security practitioners should upgrade to the patched version and audit applications using this module for input validation on UTF-8 processing.