CVE-2023-26485

cmark-gfm is GitHub's fork of cmark, a CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C. A polynomial time complexity issue in cmark-gfm may lead to unbounded resource exhaustion and subsequent denial of service. This CVE covers quadratic complexity issues when parsing text which leads with either large numbers of `_` characters. This issue has been addressed in version 0.29.0.gfm.10. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should validate that their input comes from trusted sources.




### Impact

A polynomial time complexity issue in cmark-gfm may lead to unbounded resource exhaustion and subsequent denial of service.

### Proof of concept

```
$ ~/cmark-gfm$ python3 -c 'pad = "_" * 100000; print(pad + "." + pad, end="")' | time ./build/src/cmark-gfm --to plaintext
```

Increasing the number 10000 in the above commands causes the running time to increase quadratically.

### Patches

This vulnerability have been patched in 0.29.0.gfm.10.

### Note on cmark and cmark-gfm

XXX: TBD

[cmark-gfm](https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm) is a fork of [cmark](https://github.com/commonmark/cmark) that adds the GitHub Flavored Markdown extensions. The two codebases have diverged over time, but share a common core. These bugs affect both `cmark` and `cmark-gfm`.

### Credit

We would like to thank @gravypod for reporting this vulnerability.

### References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity

### For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

* Open an issue in [github/cmark-gfm](https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm)