CVE-2026-53428
MEDIUM
6.9
CVSS 4.0
Description
Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in leandrocp mdex allows an unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service through unbounded memory allocation.
comrak_nif::lumis_adapter::LumisAdapter::parse_highlight_lines in native/comrak_nif/src/lumis_adapter.rs eagerly expands a user-controlled inclusive line range from a fenced code block's highlight_lines decorator into a Vec<usize>, pushing one element per integer in the range with no upper bound on the range size. An attacker who can supply Markdown that an application renders with MDEx.to_html/2 (for example a comment, chat message, or wiki page) can embed a code block whose info string is rust highlight_lines="1-100000000", forcing the native adapter to allocate roughly 8 bytes per line in the range.
A payload that differs by only a few bytes can therefore allocate hundreds of megabytes, and a sufficiently large range (for example 1-2000000000) exhausts host memory and aborts the BEAM, denying service to every user of the rendering process. The per-line write loop additionally tests membership with a linear scan over the same vector, degrading rendering to a quadratic cost even for ranges that do not immediately exhaust memory.
The vulnerable native code originally shipped inside mdex (in native/comrak_nif/src/lumis_adapter.rs) and was later extracted into the separate mdex_native package (native/mdex_native_nif/src/lumis_adapter.rs), where it remains unpatched.
This issue affects mdex from 0.11.0 before 0.12.3, and mdex_native from 0.1.0 before 0.2.3.
Metadata
Severity & Metrics
6.9
MEDIUM CVSS 4.0
CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H
SSVC — CISA Coordinator
Affected products (4)
| Vendor | Product | Platform | Versions |
|---|---|---|---|
| leandrocp | mdex | — | 0.11.0 < 0.12.3 |
| leandrocp | mdex | — | a8407611715d1ead35fbcba79c72cef1b7df387b < 6ed94d905f97af188323f042698ae841c02293b4 |
| leandrocp | mdex_native | — | 0.1.0 < 0.2.3 |
| leandrocp | mdex_native | — | 956528c5e31746253347029e810a969ab916fd27 < 798a363b4339f6f7162ec8437c4c9f9b5ae6fbf3 |
Weakness (CWE)
| CWE | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CWE-789 | cna | CWE-789 Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value |
CVSS scores (1)
| Score | Severity | Version | Source | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6.9 | MEDIUM | 4.0 | cna | CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H |
References (4)