What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-42821: github.com/gomarkdown/markdown Out-of-bounds Read while parsing citations

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2023-09-22 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-125

Description

The package `github.com/gomarkdown/markdown` is a Go library for parsing Markdown text and rendering as HTML. Prior to pseudoversion `0.0.0-20230922105210-14b16010c2ee`, which corresponds with commit `14b16010c2ee7ff33a940a541d993bd043a88940`, parsing malformed markdown input with parser that uses parser.Mmark extension could result in out-of-bounds read vulnerability. To exploit the vulnerability, parser needs to have `parser.Mmark` extension set. The panic occurs inside the `citation.go` file on the line 69 when the parser tries to access the element past its length. This can result in a denial of service. Commit `14b16010c2ee7ff33a940a541d993bd043a88940`/pseudoversion `0.0.0-20230922105210-14b16010c2ee` contains a patch for this issue.

Affected products

• gomarkdown markdown: all versions

References

• https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/blob/7478c230c7cd3e7328803d89abe591d0b61c41e4/parser/citation.go#L69
• https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/commit/14b16010c2ee7ff33a940a541d993bd043a88940
• https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/security/advisories/GHSA-m9xq-6h2j-65r2
• https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/blob/7478c230c7cd3e7328803d89abe591d0b61c41e4/parser/citation.go#L69
• https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/commit/14b16010c2ee7ff33a940a541d993bd043a88940
• https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/security/advisories/GHSA-m9xq-6h2j-65r2

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