Parse Server: Pre-authentication denial of service via client version header regex backtracking

CVE-2026-47138

What is CVE-2026-47138?

Parse Server is an open source backend that can be deployed to any infrastructure that can run Node.js. Prior to versions 8.6.77 and 9.9.1-alpha.1, an unauthenticated attacker who knows a publicly-known Parse Application ID can submit a single HTTP request whose client SDK version field contains adversarial input that triggers polynomial backtracking in a request-header parser. The parsing runs before session authentication and before rate limiting on every /parse/* request, so the request consumes seconds to minutes of synchronous CPU on a Node.js worker before any access control evaluates it. A small number of concurrent requests can saturate a worker; a single large request via the body-field variant can pin a worker for minutes. Production deployments running the default configuration are affected. This issue has been patched in versions 8.6.77 and 9.9.1-alpha.1.

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