CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-39209 — cmark-gfm is GitHub's fork of cmark, a CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C

High CVSS 7.5

cmark-gfm is GitHub's fork of cmark, a CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C. In versions prior to 0.29.0.gfm.6 a polynomial time complexity issue in cmark-gfm's autolink extension may lead to unbounded resource exhaustion and subsequent denial of service. Users may verify the patch by running `python3 -c 'print("![l"* 100000 + "\n")' | ./cmark-gfm -e autolink`, which will resource exhaust on unpatched cmark-gfm but render correctly on patched cmark-gfm. This vulnerability has been patched in 0.29.0.gfm.6. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should disable the use of the autolink extension.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-09-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-407

Affected products

  • github / cmark-gfm
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 35
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 36
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 37

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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