Bug 2492304 (CVE-2026-49851)

Summary: CVE-2026-49851 Mistune: Mistune: Denial of Service via crafted Markdown input
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: unspecifiedCC: anthomas, ehelms, ggainey, jkoehler, juwatts, lphiri, mhulan, nmoumoul, osousa, pcreech, rchan, rjohnson, smallamp, tmalecek
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in Mistune, a Python Markdown parser. A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by providing a specially crafted Markdown input containing many consecutive bracket characters. This can lead to excessive CPU usage, causing a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on the affected system.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-06-24 18:04:36 UTC 
Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.3.0, Mistune is vulnerable to a CPU exhaustion DoS due to superlinear (approximately O(n²)) behavior in parse_link_text. When parsing Markdown containing many consecutive [ characters, parse_link_text repeatedly scans the input using a regex search inside a loop. Each iteration re-scans a large portion of the remaining string, resulting in quadratic-time behavior. An attacker-controlled Markdown input can therefore trigger excessive CPU usage with a very small payload. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.3.0.