Vulnerability details

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.

• https://github.com/lepture/mistune/blob/df23edd60b43b639d2e6760ef9dd3d618aa11c21/src/mistune/helpers.py#L20-L25 x_refsource_MISC
• https://github.com/lepture/mistune/security/advisories/GHSA-8mp2-v27r-99xp x_refsource_CONFIRM
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-33079 vdb-entryx_refsource_REDHAT
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2467298 issue-trackingx_refsource_REDHAT
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-33079.json x_sadp-csaf-vex
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:43038 vendor-advisoryx_refsource_REDHAT
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:60520 vendor-advisoryx_refsource_REDHAT