CVE-2026-33079

Mistune ReDoS in LINK_TITLE_RE allows denial of service with crafted Markdown titles

State
Published
Severity
8.7 High
Published
May 6, 2026
Updated
Aug 28, 2026
Reserved
Mar 17, 2026

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Description

In versions 3.0.0a1 through 3.2.0 of Mistune, there is a ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service) vulnerability in `LINK_TITLE_RE` that allows an attacker who can supply Markdown for parsing to cause denial of service. The regular expression used for parsing link titles contains overlapping alternatives that can trigger catastrophic backtracking. In both the double-quoted and single-quoted branches, a backslash followed by punctuation can be matched either as an escaped punctuation sequence or as two ordinary characters, creating an ambiguous pattern inside a repeated group. If an attacker supplies Markdown containing repeated ! sequences with no closing quote, the regex engine explores an exponential number of backtracking paths. This is reachable through normal Markdown parsing of inline links and block link reference definitions. A small crafted input can therefore cause significant CPU consumption and make applications using Mistune unresponsive.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.08.7 HighCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NGitHub_M
3.17.5 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:Hredhat-SADP

Weaknesses

  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

Affected Products

ProductVersions
mistunelepture
  • >=3.0.0a1, <= 3.2.0Affected

References

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