CVE-2026-54888

Summary

Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in leandrocp mdex allows denial of service via deeply nested Markdown input.

mdex converts between an Elixir %MDEx.Document{} struct and Comrak's internal AST using two mutually recursive Rust functions, ex_document_to_comrak_ast and comrak_ast_to_ex_document, in the NIF source file document.rs. Neither function enforces a maximum nesting depth, so the recursion depth is bounded only by the structure of the input. An attacker who can get a Markdown document rendered (for example through MDEx.parse_document!/1 or MDEx.to_html/1) can supply a document with thousands of nested block quotes, which drives unbounded recursion across the NIF boundary and exhausts the native C stack.

Because the resulting stack overflow is an uncatchable SIGSEGV raised inside a NIF, it cannot be contained by the Erlang runtime. It terminates the operating system process running the BEAM, killing every Elixir and Erlang process on the node, not just the caller that triggered the render. No authentication or special privileges are required.

The vulnerable conversion code was extracted from mdex into the separate mdex_native package starting in mdex 0.12.3. This issue affects mdex from 0.3.0 before 0.12.3 and mdex_native from 0.1.0 before 0.2.3.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
leandrocpmdex0.3.0 < 0.12.3affected
leandrocpmdexd0bc7d55177727c61d188ef465178ab3b81f4f2c < 6ed94d905f97af188323f042698ae841c02293b4affected
leandrocpmdex_native0.1.0 < 0.2.3affected
leandrocpmdex_native956528c5e31746253347029e810a969ab916fd27 < 947696c47bc22bea5dffc0f78c946fa6b70ce183affected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-674: CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion

ADP Enrichment

CISA ADP Vulnrichment

  • SSVC:
  • Exploitation: poc
    • Automatable: no
    • Technical Impact: partial

Additional References

References