CVE-2026-53429
MediumCVSS 6.9Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk3th percentile - higher than 3% of all known CVEs
Summary
A missing release of memory after effective lifetime vulnerability in mdex and mdex_native allows an attacker who controls a rendered document to cause a denial of service through unbounded native memory exhaustion. The native rendering code permanently leaks memory when rendering a document containing escaped-tag nodes, leading to unlimited memory consumption and process crash.
Risk Assessment
The organization is at risk of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack via specially crafted documents. An attacker can exhaust server memory, causing all processes on the node to crash and disrupting application availability.
Recommendation
Immediately update mdex to version 0.12.3 or later, and mdex_native to version 0.2.3 or later. If updating is not possible, restrict processing of documents from untrusted users.
Other vulnerabilities in mdex
See all- CVE-2026-53428Medium
A vulnerability in the mdex and mdex_native libraries allows an unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service via unbounded memory allocation. The parse_highlight_lines function in the LumisAdapter component expands a user-controlled line range from a fenced code block without an upper bound, allocating huge vectors. A payload with a range like 1-2000000000 can exhaust host memory and abort the BEAM process.
- CVE-2026-53427Low
A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was found in the MDEx library due to improper input neutralization in Markdown processing. An attacker can inject arbitrary HTML/JavaScript that executes in the browser of every user viewing the rendered output.
- CVE-2026-54889Medium
XSS vulnerability in the mdex library for Elixir allows an attacker to inject JavaScript code via improper validation of URL schemes in Markdown to Quill Delta processing. An attacker can supply a malicious link with javascript: scheme in Markdown text, which is copied verbatim to the Delta attribute and executed in the victim's browser when rendered to HTML.
- CVE-2026-54888Medium
A vulnerability in the mdex library (and mdex_native) allows a DoS attack by supplying a deeply nested Markdown document. Recursive conversion functions lack a maximum depth check, causing a C stack overflow and crashing the entire BEAM node.
- CVE-2026-53426High
A vulnerability in the MDEx library for Elixir/Erlang allows exhaustion of the atom table by processing a specially crafted JSON document. The json_to_node/1 function creates new atoms for each unique node_type value, which are never garbage collected, leading to a crash of the entire BEAM virtual machine.
Original NVD description (English source)
Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in leandrocp mdex and mdex_native allows an attacker who controls a rendered document to cause a denial of service through unbounded native memory exhaustion. The native rendering code permanently leaks memory when rendering a document that contains escaped-tag nodes. The conversion of each %MDEx.EscapedTag{} node into its native representation (From<ExEscapedTag> for NodeValue in the Rust NIF) calls Box::leak on the caller-supplied literal string, which surrenders the backing allocation so that it lives for the entire lifetime of the operating system process and is never freed. Both the byte length of each literal and the number of escaped-tag nodes in a document are attacker-controlled, and there is no size cap, rate limit, or string interning on this path. Every render of a document containing escaped-tag nodes therefore leaks literal_size x node_count bytes that can never be reclaimed, and repeated renders accumulate without bound. Rendering reaches this path through the public MDEx.to_html/1 entry point and any other API that renders a supplied %MDEx.Document{}. Any application that uses mdex (or mdex_native directly) to render documents derived from user-supplied content is affected. Because the leaked memory is never reclaimed for the life of the BEAM process, an attacker can drive resident memory upward without limit until the node exhausts memory and crashes, taking down every process on it. The vulnerable native code originally shipped inside mdex (in native/comrak_nif/src/types/document.rs) and was later extracted into the separate mdex_native package (native/mdex_native_nif/src/types/document.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.