Resource exhaustion in markdown-it - CVE-2026-48988
Published: May 25, 2026
Vulnerability identifier: #VU132289
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 6.9 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: CVE-2026-48988
CWE-ID: CWE-400
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service.
The vulnerability exists due to uncontrolled resource consumption in the smartquotes rule when processing user-supplied markdown with the typographer option enabled. A remote attacker can submit a markdown input containing many consecutive quotation marks to cause a denial of service.
Only applications that render user-supplied markdown with typographer: true are vulnerable.
Affected software
markdown-it
How to mitigate CVE-2026-48988
Install security update from vendor's website.
markdown-it - update to 14.2.0