CVE-2026-86434
league/commonmark versions >= 2.0.0 and < 2.8.4 (patched in 2.9.0) contain a denial of service vulnerability in UniqueSlugNormalizer::normalize(), which restarts its numeric-suffix search from 1 on every slug collision, resulting in O(K^2) time complexity for K headings that collapse to the same base slug. The vulnerable path is reached when HeadingPermalinkExtension, FootnoteExtension, or TableOfContentsExtension is registered. An unauthenticated attacker can force many headings onto a single base slug (e.g., via empty ATX headings, identical heading text, or punctuation-only headings) in a small Markdown document, consuming excessive CPU and denying service.
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
- 0.29%
- CWE
- CWE-407
- Published
- 2026-09-07
- Last modified
- 2026-09-07
Affected products
- thephpleague commonmark
- thephpleague commonmark
Weakness type
Related vulnerabilities
- CVE-2026-87822 — t-digest 3.1 through 3.3 Denial of Service via NaN Centroid Means in MergingDigest.fromBytes
- CVE-2024-58382 — league/commonmark before 2.6.0 Denial of Service via Quadratic Complexity
- CVE-2023-54395 — PocketMine-MP before 4.12.5 Denial of Service via ModalFormResponsePacket
- CVE-2026-86435 — commonmark 1.5.0 before 2.8.4 Denial of Service via Footnote
- CVE-2026-86433 — commonmark 1.5.0 before 2.8.4 Denial of Service via Attributes
- CVE-2026-86430 — league/commonmark before 2.9.1 Denial of Service via parsing
- CVE-2026-86429 — commonmark before 2.9.1 Denial of Service via SmartPunct and Attributes
- CVE-2026-86428 — commonmark 1.5.0 before 2.10.0 Denial of Service via Attributes