CVE-2026-111759

markdown-it: Quadratic complexity in smartquotes with unmatched closing quotes

State
Published
Severity
7.5 High
Published
Oct 19, 2026
Updated
Oct 19, 2026
Reserved
Oct 16, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

markdown-it is a Markdown parser. Prior to 14.3.2 and 15.0.2, when typographer: true is enabled, specially crafted Markdown can cause quadratic processing time in the smartquotes rule, potentially leading to denial of service in applications processing untrusted input. Many opening double quotes followed by unmatched closing single quotes cause repeated scans of the entire opener stack. The same issue occurs with the quote types reversed. The default configuration (typographer: false) is not affected, but this option is enabled with high probability. This issue is fixed in versions 14.3.2 and 15.0.2.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.5 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HGitHub_M

Weaknesses

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

Affected Products

ProductVersions
markdown-itmarkdown-it
  • >= 15.0.0, < 15.0.2Affected
  • < 14.3.2Affected

References

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