CVE-2026-49851
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.
Scoring
- Severity
- HIGH
- CVSS base score
- 8.7
- CVSS vector
- 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
- EPSS probability
- 0.63%
- CWE
- CWE-400, CWE-770, CWE-407
- Published
- 2026-06-24
- Last modified
- 2026-08-28
Affected products
- lepture mistune
Weakness type
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