High severity · published Aug 6, 2026
CVE-2026-71488
league/commonmark: Quadratic-time denial of service when parsing crafted Markdown
7.5
CVSS
0.6%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
league/commonmark is a PHP library for parsing and rendering CommonMark Markdown. From 0.6.0 until 2.9.0, specially crafted Markdown lines can cause the parser to have quadratic time complexity when converting, because several parsing paths repeatedly rescan growing portions of a line to translate between character positions and byte positions, and the Autolink extension can also copy and validate the remaining line at every URL-like prefix, allowing an attacker who can submit Markdown for conversion to consume disproportionate CPU time with a comparatively small request. This issue is fixed in 2.9.0.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.6% · higher than 50% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
CO
commonmark · thephpleague
>= 0.6.0, < 2.9.0 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-71488
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-71488
github.com
https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/commit/a6ef6cdc308dfa39a34239c35818e75892a0e6a8
github.com
https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/commit/a70979ea0d7d3377bd7127536748454a922bf5eb
github.com
https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/commit/c97b02e5e652b992033b93ba5d6182f706343fc6
github.com
https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/releases/tag/2.9.0
github.com
https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/security/advisories/GHSA-2q4p-g7hv-5rgv
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