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Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

CVE-2026-48988

Medium
5.3/10

Summary

markdown-it is a Markdown parser. Versions 14.1.1 and below contain a denial-of-service vulnerability when `typographer: true` is enabled, due to quadratic (O(n^2)) processing in the smartquotes rule. The issue stems from repeatedly modifying strings with `replaceAt()`, which performs O(n) slicing and concatenation per quote character. This can cause excessive CPU consumption when parsing quote-heavy, user-supplied markdown and may let attackers degrade or disrupt service availability. Although typographer is disabled by default, many production apps enable it for smart typography, making the issue relevant. This issue has been fixed in version 14.2.0.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • LOW

CWE-400 - Uncontrolled resource consumption

An uncontrolled resource allocation attack (also known as resource exhaustion attack) triggers unauthorized overconsumption of the limited resources in an application, such as memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. This may lead to denial of service for valid users and degradation of the application's functionality as well as that of the host operating system.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published