CVE-2021-41168: Hash-Collision Denial-of-Service Vulnerability in snudown

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2021-10-21 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Snudown is a reddit-specific fork of the Sundown Markdown parser used by GitHub, with Python integration added. In affected versions snudown was found to be vulnerable to denial of service attacks to its reference table implementation. References written in markdown ` [reference_name]: https://www.example.com` are inserted into a hash table which was found to have a weak hash function, meaning that an attacker can reliably generate a large number of collisions for it. This makes the hash table vulnerable to a hash-collision DoS attack, a type of algorithmic complexity attack. Further the hash table allowed for duplicate entries resulting in long retrieval times. Proofs of concept and further discussion of the hash collision issue are discussed on the snudown GHSA(https://github.com/reddit/snudown/security/advisories/GHSA-6gvv-9q92-w5f6). Users are advised to update to version 1.7.0.

Affected products

reddit snudown: before 1.7.0 — fixed in 1.7.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: reddit snudown 1.7.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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