high Patched

league/commonmark: Denial of service via colliding heading slugs

CVE-2026-86434 · GHSA-mh25-x5hq-wrqp · published 6 Aug 2026

How serious is it

  • Severity: high.
  • No exploit prediction (EPSS) score yet.
  • Not on the CISA list of exploited vulnerabilities.
  • No public exploit in Exploit-DB.

Is your app affected by CVE-2026-86434?

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Who is affected

  • league/commonmark (Packagist) >= 2.0.0, < 2.9.0

How to check

  1. Run composer show league/commonmark in your project to see the installed version, including copies pulled in by other packages.
  2. Or paste your lockfile into the checker: it lists every package with a known vulnerability, this one included.

How to fix

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  1. Upgrade league/commonmark to 2.9.0 or later, commit the lockfile and redeploy.
  2. If a vulnerable version was live, check your logs and rotate the secrets that server could read.

The advisory

### 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.

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References

Merged from OSV. Last updated 24 Oct 2026. All vulnerabilities · RSS · JSON