CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2026-48988 — markdown-it is a Markdown parser
markdown-it is a Markdown parser. Versions 14.1.1 and below contain a denial-of-service vulnerability when typographer: true is enabled, due to quadratic (O(n^2)) processing in the smartquotes rule. The issue stems from repeatedly modifying strings with replaceAt(), which performs O(n) slicing and concatenation per quote character. This can cause excessive CPU consumption when parsing quote-heavy, user-supplied markdown and may let attackers degrade or disrupt service availability. Although typographer is disabled by default, many production apps enable it for smart typography, making the issue relevant. This issue has been fixed in version 14.2.0.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.3 (3.1)
- Published
- 2026-06-17
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- markdown-it_project / markdown-it
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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