CVE-2026-49851

Mistune: Potential DoS via quadratic-time parsing in parse_link_text

State
Published
Severity
8.7 High
Published
Jun 24, 2026
Updated
Aug 28, 2026
Reserved
Jun 1, 2026

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Description

Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.3.0, Mistune is vulnerable to a CPU exhaustion DoS due to superlinear (approximately O(n²)) behavior in parse_link_text. When parsing Markdown containing many consecutive [ characters, parse_link_text repeatedly scans the input using a regex search inside a loop. Each iteration re-scans a large portion of the remaining string, resulting in quadratic-time behavior. An attacker-controlled Markdown input can therefore trigger excessive CPU usage with a very small payload. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.3.0.

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-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

Affected Products

ProductVersions
mistunelepture
  • < 3.3.0Affected

References

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