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OpenAdvisories
High · 7.5 CVE-2026-121437 EUVD-2026-115859GHSA-xr4w-hw52-gjv9

Mistune 3.3.0 before 3.3.4 Quadratic-Time DoS via _process_emphasis_delimiters

Published Nov 3, 2026 · Updated Nov 3, 2026 · Assigned by VulnCheck

Description

Mistune from 3.3.0 before 3.3.4 contains a denial of service vulnerability that allows remote attackers to exhaust CPU through quadratic-time emphasis delimiter processing. Attackers can submit small markdown documents with repeated patterns like "*a_b" to trigger an O(n²) index-fixup loop, stalling workers for seconds.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
lepture mistune 3.3.0 – < 3.3.4 3.3.4

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 mistune No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 mistune No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS mistune No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS mistune No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS mistune No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS mistune No fix yet —
Show 2 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS mistune No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS mistune No fix yet —

References