6.9
MEDIUM CVSS 4.0
CVE-2026-53429
Unbounded native memory leak in mdex escaped-tag rendering enables unauthenticated denial of service
Description

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in leandrocp mdex and mdex_native allows an attacker who controls a rendered document to cause a denial of service through unbounded native memory exhaustion. The native rendering code permanently leaks memory when rendering a document that contains escaped-tag nodes. The conversion of each %MDEx.EscapedTag{} node into its native representation (From<ExEscapedTag> for NodeValue in the Rust NIF) calls Box::leak on the caller-supplied literal string, which surrenders the backing allocation so that it lives for the entire lifetime of the operating system process and is never freed. Both the byte length of each literal and the number of escaped-tag nodes in a document are attacker-controlled, and there is no size cap, rate limit, or string interning on this path. Every render of a document containing escaped-tag nodes therefore leaks literal_size x node_count bytes that can never be reclaimed, and repeated renders accumulate without bound. Rendering reaches this path through the public MDEx.to_html/1 entry point and any other API that renders a supplied %MDEx.Document{}. Any application that uses mdex (or mdex_native directly) to render documents derived from user-supplied content is affected. Because the leaked memory is never reclaimed for the life of the BEAM process, an attacker can drive resident memory upward without limit until the node exhausts memory and crashes, taking down every process on it. The vulnerable native code originally shipped inside mdex (in native/comrak_nif/src/types/document.rs) and was later extracted into the separate mdex_native package (native/mdex_native_nif/src/types/document.rs), where it remains unpatched. This issue affects mdex from 0.11.0 before 0.12.3, and mdex_native from 0.1.0 before 0.2.3.

INFO

Published Date :

June 29, 2026, 7:07 p.m.

Last Modified :

June 29, 2026, 7:07 p.m.

Remotely Exploit :

No

Source :

EEF
Affected Products

The following products are affected by CVE-2026-53429 vulnerability. Even if cvefeed.io is aware of the exact versions of the products that are affected, the information is not represented in the table below.

No affected product recoded yet

CVSS Scores
The Common Vulnerability Scoring System is a standardized framework for assessing the severity of vulnerabilities in software and systems. We collect and displays CVSS scores from various sources for each CVE.
Score Version Severity Vector Exploitability Score Impact Score Source
CVSS 4.0 MEDIUM 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
Solution
Update mdex and mdex_native to patched versions to prevent unbounded native memory exhaustion.
  • Update mdex to version 0.12.3 or later.
  • Update mdex_native to version 0.2.3 or later.
  • Review and fix memory leak in native rendering code.
  • Implement limits on document size and node count.

We scan GitHub repositories to detect new proof-of-concept exploits. Following list is a collection of public exploits and proof-of-concepts, which have been published on GitHub (sorted by the most recently updated).

Results are limited to the first 15 repositories due to potential performance issues.

The following list is the news that have been mention CVE-2026-53429 vulnerability anywhere in the article.

EPSS is a daily estimate of the probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days. Following chart shows the EPSS score history of the vulnerability.