CVE-2026-44898: Mistune TOC Anchor Injection XSS

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2026-05-26 · updated 2026-07-24
Weakness: CWE-79

Description

Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.2.1, render_toc_ul() builds a <ul> table-of-contents tree from a list of (level, id, text) tuples. Both the id value (used as href="#<id>") and the text value (used as the visible link label) are inserted into <a> tags via a plain Python format string — with no HTML escaping applied to either value. When heading IDs are derived from user-supplied heading text (the standard use-case for readable slug anchors), an attacker can craft a heading whose text breaks out of the href="#..." attribute context, injecting arbitrary HTML tags including <script> blocks directly into the rendered TOC. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.2.1.

Affected products

lepture mistune: before 3.2.1 — fixed in 3.2.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: lepture mistune 3.2.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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