CVE-2026-33079: high-severity vulnerability in lepture mistune
Mistune ReDoS in LINK_TITLE_RE allows denial of service with crafted Markdown titles
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21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.6%
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.
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 · mistuneRelated CVEs — lepture mistune
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-59928HIGHMistune block_parser: quadratic-time parsing on long lists of repeated reference-link definitionsEPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-59925HIGHinline_parser: quadratic-time parsing on long runs of `**x**` and `***x***` emphasis pairsEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-59922HIGHMistune plugins/formatting: quadratic-time parsing on long runs of `~~x~~`, `==x==`, and `^^x^^` markers (strikethrough / mark / insert)EPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-121437HIGHMistune 3.3.0 before 3.3.4 Quadratic-Time DoS via _process_emphasis_delimitersEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-59927MEDIUMMistune directives/include: mutual `.. include::` recursion crashes the renderer with `RecursionError`, denial of service via two attacker-controlled markdown filesEPSS 0.5%CVE-2026-49851HIGHMistune: Potential DoS via quadratic-time parsing in parse_link_textEPSS 0.5%
References
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:43038https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:60520https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-33079https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2467298https://github.com/lepture/mistune/blob/df23edd60b43b639d2e6760ef9dd3d618aa11c21/src/mistune/helpers.py#L20-L25https://github.com/lepture/mistune/security/advisories/GHSA-8mp2-v27r-99xphttps://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-33079.json