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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2026-121437 json

Mistune 3.3.0 before 3.3.4 Quadratic-Time DoS via _process_emphasis_delimiters

published 6d ago modified 6d ago also EUVD-2026-115859

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 49%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Mistune from 3.3.0 before 3.3.4 contains a denial of service vulnerability that allows remote attackers to exhaust CPU through quadratic-time emphasis delimiter processing. Attackers can submit small markdown documents with repeated patterns like "*a_b" to trigger an O(n²) index-fixup loop, stalling workers for seconds.

Patch / fix

  • lepture mistune 3.3.4

Is CVE-2026-121437 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2026-121437 updated cvss 7.5

mistune: mistune: Denial of Service via quadratic-time emphasis delimiter processing

  • Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-feature-server-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th-torch-cpu-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th-torch-cuda-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th-torch-rocm-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-cpu-torch210-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-rocm64-torch291-py312-rhel9, +19 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available
  • Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-th06-cpu-torch291-py312-rhel9, rhoai/odh-th06-cuda130-torch291-py312-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 python-mistune 0.8.3-15.2.el9ocp
    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
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
6d ago

Exploit prediction

0.62% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 49% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/lepture/mistune/security/advisories/GHSA-qp42-r9j6-83g9 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 8.7 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
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CNA 4.0 8.7 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Affected products

  • lepture mistune

Classification

Weakness
  • 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.