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GHSA-253c-mchw-3w2r json

markdown-it linkify: true has two quadratic paths, so a few hundred KB of markdown blocks the event loop for tens of seconds

published 2mo ago modified last mo.

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
—
no score, EPSS covers CVEs only
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

## Summary

Two independent quadratic paths in the `linkify: true` handling. Both are in markdown-it's own code rather than in linkify-it, which stays linear on both payloads.

`src/rules_core/linkify.ts` calls `arrayReplaceAt` once per linkified text token, and that rebuilds the whole `children` array each time. A paragraph of N soft-broken lines is one inline token with about 2N children, so you get N rebuilds over a 2N array. Schema-less emails are what reach it. A `http://` link gets consumed by the inline rule first and never arrives as a text token, so those stay linear.

`src/rules_inline/linkify.ts` runs `state.pending.match(SCHEME_RE)` at every `://` in the source. `state.pending` only gets truncated once a link is actually produced, so an unregistered scheme leaves it growing and every `://` rescans the lot.

## Proof of concept

Clean install of 15.0.0 from npm, `new MarkdownIt({ linkify: true }).render(payload)`, Node 24.

| N | 5,000 | 10,000 | 20,000 | 40,000 | |---|---|---|---|---| | `'a@b.co\n'.repeat(N)`, 34KB to 273KB | 1.1s | 4.7s | 19.6s | 89s | | `'a://'.repeat(N)`, 20KB to 156KB | 0.25s | 0.76s | 3.1s | 15.0s |

Doubling the input roughly quadruples the time in both. With `linkify: false` the same inputs run in 25 to 131ms and stay flat.

Controls for the first one, all at N=20000: putting every email in a single text token (`'a@b.co '`) takes 0.59s, one email per paragraph (`'a@b.co\n\n'`) takes 0.64s, and soft-broken lines with nothing linkifiable take 42ms. So it needs many children AND many of them linkifying. For the second, replaying just the `SCHEME_RE` calls against the same growing prefixes with no markdown-it involved accounts for 11.7s of the 15s.

Ordinary prose does it too. `'ping a@b.co ok\n'.repeat(20000)` is 293KB and takes 31s.

## Caveat

`linkify` is off by default, so this only reaches apps that turn it on.

## Impact

Availability only. A few hundred KB of fairly ordinary markdown pins one core for tens of seconds, and because it's quadratic it degrades quickly with size. Nothing is read, written or executed.

Patch / fix

Is GHSA-253c-mchw-3w2r 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.

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Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm markdown-it
>=15.0.0, <15.0.1
<14.3.1
15.0.1
14.3.1

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.

The maintainers of markdown-it/markdown-it published their own advisory on GitHub. Reviewed sources take precedence over it.