What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2023-28626: Quadratic runtime when parsing Markdown in comrak
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 1.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2023-03-28 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-400
Description
comrak is a CommonMark + GFM compatible Markdown parser and renderer written in rust. A range of quadratic parsing issues are present in Comrak. These can be used to craft denial-of-service attacks on services that use Comrak to parse Markdown. This issue has been addressed in version 0.17.0. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability. This issue is also tracked as `GHSL-2023-047`
Affected products
- kivikakk comrak: before 0.17.0 — fixed in 0.17.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: kivikakk comrak 0.17.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://github.com/kivikakk/comrak/commit/ce795b7f471b01589f842dc09af38b025701178d
- https://github.com/kivikakk/comrak/security/advisories/GHSA-8hqf-xjwp-p67v
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/OUYME2VA555X6567H7ORIJQFN4BVGT6N/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PTWZWCT7KCX2KTXTLPUYZ3EHOONG4X46/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VQ3UBC7LE4VPCMZBTADIBL353CH7CPVV/
- https://github.com/kivikakk/comrak/commit/ce795b7f471b01589f842dc09af38b025701178d
- https://github.com/kivikakk/comrak/security/advisories/GHSA-8hqf-xjwp-p67v
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/OUYME2VA555X6567H7ORIJQFN4BVGT6N/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PTWZWCT7KCX2KTXTLPUYZ3EHOONG4X46/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VQ3UBC7LE4VPCMZBTADIBL353CH7CPVV/
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