GHSA-mh25-x5hq-wrqp

league/commonmark: Denial of service via colliding heading slugs

Published

2026-08-06

Modified

2026-08-06

Sources

github-advisory

Summary

### Impact `UniqueSlugNormalizer::normalize()` makes each slug document-unique by searching for an unused numeric suffix, but **restarts that search from `1` on every collision**. The k-th heading that collapses to the same base slug performs k−1 array lookups, so K colliding slugs cost Σ(k−1) = **O(K²)**. An attacker can force every heading onto a single base slug trivially — many empty ATX headings, identical heading text, or punctuation-only headings that normalize to the empty string. The path is reached whenever the shared slug normalizer runs over attacker-controlled text. That happens when `HeadingPermalinkExtension` is registered (its `HeadingPermalinkProcessor` normalizes every heading), independently through `FootnoteExtension` (its `AnonymousFootnoteRefParser` normalizes every `^[label]` reference), and on any `TableOfContentsExtension` site (which requires `HeadingPermalinkExtension` to be co-registered). The default `slug_normalizer/unique` setting (`UniqueSlugNormalizerInterface::PER_DOCUMENT`) accumulates collisions across the whole document. No authentication is required — a small document body turns into seconds of CPU and denies service. Availability impact only. **`UniqueSlugNormalizer` was introduced in 2.0.0 (first shipped in 2.0.0-beta1, May 2021); the 1.x heading-permalink slug generator performed no de-duplication and is not affected. All 2.x releases (including 2.8.x) are affected.** ### Workarounds Integrators who cannot upgrade immediately can: - **Set `slug_normalizer/unique` to `false` / `UniqueSlugNormalizerInterface::DISABLED`**, which stops the de-duplication scan entirely — at the cost of losing id uniqueness (colliding headings then share an anchor). - **Disable `HeadingPermalinkExtension`** (and `TableOfContentsExtension`, which depends on it), and `FootnoteExtension` where anonymous footnotes reach the same normalizer, for untrusted Markdown. - **Cap the accepted document size / heading count upstream** so K cannot reach the quadratic danger zone. Each of these trades off functionality or correctness; upgrading to the patched release (which removes the quadratic behavior while keeping unique ids and identical output) is the recommended remediation.

Affected packages

Remediation: Upgrade to 2.9.0 or later.

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-mh25-x5hq-wrqp