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RUSTSEC-2026-0433

Quadratic parsing of nested image wikilinks with ENABLE_WIKILINKS

Reported
Issued
Package
pulldown-cmark (crates.io)
Type
Vulnerability
Categories
Keywords
#markdown #wikilinks #memory-exhaustion
References
CVSS Score
7.5 HIGH
CVSS Details
Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality Impact
None
Integrity Impact
None
Availability Impact
High
CVSS Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Patched
  • >=0.13.6
Unaffected
  • <0.13.0

Description

With Options::ENABLE_WIKILINKS, handle_wikilink builds a wikilink's target from the raw text of its body: scan_wikilink_pipe walks it looking for |, then contains('\0') and from_replace_nuls walk it again. Once a wikilink is created, disable_all_links only disables Link entries, so every enclosing ![[ stays live on the wikilink stack. On ![[![[![[…]]]]]] each of those openers then resolves in turn and rescans everything inside it, which is quadratic in the nesting depth. The event count stays tiny, because in the unpiped case each enclosing image replaces its body with a fresh text node, so all of that work is thrown away.

Applications that parse untrusted Markdown with ENABLE_WIKILINKS set, including through Options::all(), are affected. The option is off by default. Parsing without it is not affected.

The flaw was fixed in #1186 and released in 0.13.6.

Advisory available under CC0-1.0 license.