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Fencer Intel
medium 5.3

CVE-2026-121438 json

Mistune before 3.3.3 Denial of Service via Balanced Bracket Link Parsing

published 6d ago modified 2d ago also EUVD-2026-115860

cvss
5.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 21%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Mistune before 3.3.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability in InlineParser.parse_link that allows attackers to cause quadratic CPU growth by supplying balanced nested brackets. Attackers can submit crafted Markdown with thousands of nested bracket pairs not forming a valid link, triggering repeated _contains_nested_link scans that exhaust CPU in parsing applications.

Patch / fix

  • lepture mistune 3.3.3
  • python-mistune openSUSE Tumbleweed 3.4.0-3.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:12476-1

Is CVE-2026-121438 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-2026-121438 updated cvss 5.3

mistune: mistune: Denial of Service via deeply nested Markdown brackets

  • 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-cpu-torch291-py312-rhel9, +21 more Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 python-mistune 0.8.3-15.2.el9ocp
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”

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
2d ago

Exploit prediction

0.29% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 21% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/lepture/mistune/security/advisories/GHSA-47p6-w2rc-5qf7 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 6.9 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CNA 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CNA 4.0 6.9 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/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-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

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.