CVE-2026-121437

Mistune before 3.3.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability in InlineParser.parse_link that allows attackers to cause quadratic CPU growth by supplying balanced nested brackets. Attackers can submit crafted Markdown with thousands of nested bracket pairs not forming a valid link, triggering repeated _contains_nested_link scans that exhaust CPU in parsing applications.

Mistune before 3.3.0 contains a path traversal vulnerability in the Include directive that allows attackers to read arbitrary files by supplying ../ sequences in include paths. Attackers can also inject HTML through unescaped error messages and included file contents to perform cross-site scripting even when escape=True is set.

A path traversal vulnerability in Mistune's opt-in Include directive allows attackers to read local files by supplying relative or absolute include paths. An attacker submitting Markdown rendered via Markdown.read() can disclose files such as /etc/passwd and inject unescaped HTML or script content into rendered output.

Mistune before 3.3.0 contains a path traversal vulnerability in the RST include directive that allows attackers to read arbitrary files by supplying relative or absolute paths. Attackers can submit markdown containing include directives referencing ../ sequences or absolute paths to embed sensitive files like credentials or environment data in rendered HTML.

Mistune before 3.3.0 contains an algorithmic complexity vulnerability in the inline link parser that allows unauthenticated attackers to exhaust CPU by submitting long runs of unmatched '[' characters. Attackers can send small markdown payloads that trigger O(N^2) parse_link_text and parse_link_label probing, occupying rendering workers for 30+ seconds per 16 KB input.

Mistune from 3.2.1 before 3.3.0 contains a CSS injection vulnerability that allows attackers controlling markdown input to inject arbitrary style declarations via the unvalidated figwidth option of the figure directive. Attackers can append declarations like background:url() to the rendered figure style attribute, forcing victim browsers to send requests to attacker servers and leak attribute values.

Mistune before 3.3.0 contains a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the Include directive that emits included .html, .xhtml, or .htm file content as raw block_html tokens. Attackers who can plant an HTML file readable by the renderer can reference it via an include directive, combined with path traversal, to execute stored scripts when escape=False is set.

Mistune from 3.0.0 before 3.3.0 contains an algorithmic complexity denial of service vulnerability in the parse_link_text function in src/mistune/helpers.py. Attackers can submit markdown with deeply nested square brackets triggering quadratic parsing time, exhausting server CPU with small crafted requests.

Mistune from 3.0.0 before 3.3.0 contains an algorithmic complexity vulnerability in the inline link parser's parse_link_text function that allows unauthenticated attackers to exhaust CPU with unbalanced brackets. Attackers can submit Markdown containing many unbalanced '[' or '![' characters, forcing repeated unbounded forward scans and tying up worker processes for minutes.

Mistune before 3.3.0 contains an inefficient algorithmic complexity vulnerability in parse_link_text that allows remote attackers to cause denial of service through unbalanced square brackets. Attackers can submit markdown containing long runs of unmatched brackets to mistune.html(), triggering repeated forward scans that stall worker processes for minutes.