markdown-it: Quadratic complexity DoS in smartquotes rule via replaceAt string operations
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.3epss 0.4%
exploitation probability
0.4%top 69% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Affected products
markdown-it · markdown-it