Uncontrolled recursion over deeply nested Markdown crashes the BEAM in mdex

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.

Timeline

1. Jun 29, 2026, 7:10 PM UTCCVE published
2. Jun 29, 2026, 8:47 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Jun 30, 2026, 4:37 AM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• mdex

  From 0.3.0 · fixed in 0.12.3

• leandrocp/mdex

  Version range not reported

• mdex_native

  From 0.1.0 · fixed in 0.2.3

• leandrocp/mdex_native

  Version range not reported

References 4