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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2026-111759 json

markdown-it: Quadratic complexity in smartquotes with unmatched closing quotes

published 21d ago modified 20d ago also EUVD-2026-104538 , GHSA-r7fv-28h4-cvq7

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.6%
EPSS 0.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 48%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

markdown-it is a Markdown parser. Prior to 14.3.2 and 15.0.2, when typographer: true is enabled, specially crafted Markdown can cause quadratic processing time in the smartquotes rule, potentially leading to denial of service in applications processing untrusted input. Many opening double quotes followed by unmatched closing single quotes cause repeated scans of the entire opener stack. The same issue occurs with the quote types reversed. The default configuration (typographer: false) is not affected, but this option is enabled with high probability. This issue is fixed in versions 14.3.2 and 15.0.2.

Patch / fix

  • npm markdown-it 14.3.2, 15.0.2
  • markdown-it_project markdown-it 14.3.2, 15.0.2

Is CVE-2026-111759 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

Check with Fencer

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-111759 updated cvss 7.5

markdown-it: markdown-it: Denial of Service via mismatched quote parsing

  • Red Hat Build of Podman Desktop rh-podman-desktop 3c6fc75a2a6cf5bb9b8a667fddcbbf428132badc Red Hat Ceph Storage 9 thrift Red Hat Developer Hub 1 rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-feature-server-rhel9, rhoai/odh-workbench-codeserver-datascience-cpu-py312-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces devspaces/code-rhel9, devspaces/openvsx-rhel9, devspaces/pluginregistry-rhel9 Red Hat Self-service automation portal 2 ansible-automation-platform/automation-portal, ansible-automation-platform/bootc-automation-portal-rhel9
    affected: workaround, no fix available
  • Red Hat Developer Hub 1 rhdh/red-hat-developer-hub-backstage-plugin-lightspeed-backend, rhdh/red-hat-developer-hub-backstage-plugin-orchestrator-backend
    not affected: vulnerable code not in execute path
  • Red Hat Hardened Images libgit2 1.9.7-1.hum1, libgit2_1.9 1.9.7-3.1.hum1
    not affected: component not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
21d ago

Exploit prediction

0.59% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 48% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it/security/advisories/GHSA-r7fv-28h4-cvq7 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
GitHub 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm markdown-it
>=15.0.0, <15.0.2
<14.3.2
15.0.2
14.3.2

Affected products

  • markdown-it markdown-it

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.