GHSA-g2gp-3wwq-f4ph

league/commonmark: Denial of service via adjacent inline attribute blocks

Published

2026-08-06

Modified

2026-08-06

Sources

github-advisory

Summary

### Impact With the Attributes extension enabled, `AttributesListener::findTargetAndDirection()` resolves each attribute node's target by walking outward through its siblings. For a run of N adjacent inline attribute blocks placed at the start of a block (with nothing to their left), each node scans the **entire** sibling list to the far-right end before giving up and falling back to the parent. Each resolution is therefore Θ(N) and the whole run is **Θ(N²)**. Reaching the path requires `AttributesExtension` (opt-in, but first-party: `League\CommonMark\Extension\Attributes\AttributesExtension`). No other configuration matters — the quadratic walk runs unconditionally during parsing and is **not** gated by the `attributes/allow` allow-list, the `on*` hardening added in 2.7.0, or `allow_unsafe_links`. An unauthenticated attacker can submit a **~32 KB** input (`{#a}` repeated 8,000 times) that takes **over 5 seconds** to convert, with time growing quadratically in input length — a cheap denial of service. Availability impact only. **The Attributes extension was introduced in 1.5.0 (May 2020) with this outward-walk resolver present from the first commit, so all releases from 1.5.0 onward (including every 2.x) are affected.** ### Workarounds There is no library-level configuration that gates the quadratic walk. Integrators who cannot upgrade can only reduce exposure indirectly: - **Disable the Attributes extension** for untrusted input, or - **Impose a strict maximum input length before conversion** — noting that because the cost is quadratic, even a modest cap must be small to meaningfully bound worst-case CPU. Upgrading to a release containing the fix is recommended.

Affected packages

Remediation: Upgrade to 2.9.0 or later.

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-g2gp-3wwq-f4ph