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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.5

CVE-2021-21254 json

Regular expression Denial of Service in Markdown plugin

published 2021-01-29 5 y ago modified 2026-07-08 4 mo ago also GHSA-hgmg-hhc8-g5wr , EUVD-2021-0505

cvss
6.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.8%
EPSS 1.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 78%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

CKEditor 5 is an open source rich text editor framework with a modular architecture. The CKEditor 5 Markdown plugin (@ckeditor/ckeditor5-markdown-gfm) before version 25.0.0 has a regex denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerability. The vulnerability allowed to abuse link recognition regular expression, which could cause a significant performance drop resulting in browser tab freeze. It affects all users using CKEditor 5 Markdown plugin at version <= 24.0.0. The problem has been recognized and patched. The fix will be available in version 25.0.0.

Patch / fix

  • npm @ckeditor/ckeditor5-markdown-gfm 25.0.0
  • ckeditor ckeditor5 25.0.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-21254 updated

ckeditor: Denial of service in link recognition regular expression

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.81% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 78% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm @ckeditor/ckeditor5-markdown-gfm
<25.0.0
25.0.0

Affected products

  • ckeditor ckeditor5

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.