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Unbounded resource exhaustion in cmark-gfm autolink extension may lead to denial of service — commonmarker

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Impact

CommonMarker uses cmark-gfm for rendering Github Flavored Markdown. A polynomial time complexity issue in cmark-gfm's autolink extension may lead to unbounded resource exhaustion and subsequent denial of service.

Patches

This vulnerability has been patched in the following CommonMarker release:

  • v0.23.6

Workarounds

Disable use of the autolink extension.

References

https://github.com/gjtorikian/commonmarker/pull/190 https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm/security/advisories/GHSA-cgh3-p57x-9q7q https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Legit Security for reporting this vulnerability.

  • Published: Sep 21, 2022
  • Updated: Apr 14, 2023
  • GHSA: GHSA-4qw4-jpp4-8gvp
  • Severity: Medium
  • Exploit:
  • CISA KEV:

No technical information available.

CWEs:

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A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

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