Vulnerability in Lepture Mistune

CVE-2026-33079

In versions 3.0.0a1 through 3.2.0 of Mistune, there is a ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service) vulnerability in `LINK_TITLE_RE` that allows an attacker who can supply Markdown for parsing to cause denial of service. The regular expression used for parsing link titles contains overlapping alternatives that can trigger catastrophic backtracking. In both the double-quoted and single-quoted branches, a backslash followed by punctuation can be matched either as an escaped punctuation sequence or as two ordinary characters, creating an ambiguous pattern inside a repeated group. If an attacker supplies Markdown containing repeated ! sequences with no closing quote, the regex engine explores an exponential number of backtracking paths. This is reachable through normal Markdown parsing of inline links and block link reference definitions. A small crafted input can therefore cause significant CPU consumption and make applications using Mistune unresponsive.

Vulnerability class: ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service)

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.007 (52.2th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 52nd percentile — 52.2% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-33079: held from 0.005 to 0.007.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.007 · change: +0.002

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-33079?
CVE-2026-33079 is a high-severity vulnerability in Lepture Mistune, classified under Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2026-05-06.
How severe is CVE-2026-33079?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.