CVE-2026-49851

HIGH

Mistune: Potential DoS via quadratic-time parsing in parse_link_text

Title source: cna
STIX 2.1

Description

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.

Scores

CVSS v3 7.5
EPSS 0.0035
EPSS Percentile 27.1%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CISA SSVC

Vulnrichment
Exploitation poc
Automatable yes
Technical Impact partial

Details

CWE
CWE-1333 CWE-400 CWE-407 CWE-770
Status published
Products (2)
lepture/mistune < 3.3.0
pypi/mistune 0 - 3.3.0PyPI
Published Jun 24, 2026
Tracked Since Jun 24, 2026