Skip to content
Log inStart free trial

GHSA-8hqf-xjwp-p67v CVE-2023-28626

Comrak vulnerable to quadratic runtime issues when parsing Markdown (GHSL-2023-047)

High crates.io
Severity
5.3 / 10
High · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS)
1.12%
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 66.17% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited
No
Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness
CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
Fix
0.17.0
Upgrade comrak to this version or later

Description

Impact

A range of quadratic parsing issues from cmark/cmark-gfm are also present in Comrak. These can be used to craft denial-of-service attacks on services that use Comrak to parse Markdown.

Patches

0.17.0 contains fixes to known quadratic parsing issues.

Workarounds

n/a

References

Affected versions

crates.io

PackageVulnerableFixed in
comrak
< 0.17.0
0.17.0

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

comrak crates.io → 0.17.0

cargo
cargo update -p comrak --precise 0.17.0

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 5.3

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low

Weakness

CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

How to prevent it
  • Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
  • Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.
  • Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
  • Implementation: Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.

References

Advisories

Packages

Other links

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. Last updated by the source
  3. Latest EPSS score
AdvisorySeverityWhy it's related
GHSA-5r3x-p7xx-x6q5
Comrak AST node data is not validated (GHSL-2023-049)
Critical Also affects comrak
GHSA-xxmq-4vph-956w
Comrak vulnerable to production of excessive output when parsing Markdown (GHSL-2023-048)
Medium Also affects comrak
GHSA-6wj2-g87r-pm62
Cross-site Scripting in comrak
Medium Also affects comrak
GHSA-xmr7-v725-2jjr
Cross site scripting in comrak
Medium Also affects comrak
GHSA-cggf-277g-3q54
pypdf has possible large memory usage when parsing page tree
High Same weakness, CWE-400
GHSA-3g3m-2fjr-6pw4
Glob: AbortSignal cancellation bypass allows post-timeout filesystem traversal
Medium Same weakness, CWE-400
GHSA-42gh-23hr-vphw
pypdf has possible long runtimes when retrieving page labels
High Same weakness, CWE-400
GHSA-4vqv-7265-gm2w
pypdf has possible large memory usage for exceptions in strict mode
High Same weakness, CWE-400
Is this in your code?

MergeHarbor checks every repository's dependencies against this database, ranks what matters by exploitability and reachability, routes it to the owning team and opens the fix pull request.

Check your repos with MergeHarbor