7.5High

CVE-2026-86435

commonmark versions from 1.5.0 before 2.8.4 contain a denial of service vulnerability in the Footnote extension that fails to deduplicate footnote definitions. Attackers can craft documents with duplicate footnote definitions and references to create quadratic output expansion, consuming excessive memory and CPU to exhaust server resources.

What this means for your business

  • An attacker can use it remotely, over a network, without a login, and without anyone at your company clicking anything.
  • FIRST's prediction model gives it a 0.3% chance of attack attempts being seen in the next 30 days, ranking above 20% of all known flaws.

What to do

  1. 1Ask your IT team or provider whether any of your systems use the affected product.
  2. 2If you do, follow the vendor's guidance. No patch reference has been published yet.

Not sure if your company is exposed?

Fastnexa’s certified penetration testers can check whether attackers could use this flaw, or others like it, against your websites, apps and network. The full test is free for our first 10 founding clients until 31 December 2026.

Scoring

CVSS
7.5 (v3.1)
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4
8.7
Weakness
CWE-407
Assigned by
disclosure@vulncheck.com

Dates

Published
2026-09-07
Last modified
2026-09-09
Sources
NVD

References