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Mistune: Potential DoS via quadratic-time parsing in parse_link_text

21Vexday Risk Score

No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.

ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.3%
exploitation probability
0.3%top 73% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
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.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
lepture · mistune