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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2022-21681 json

Exponential catastrophic backtracking (ReDoS) in marked

published 2022-01-14 4 y ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-5v2h-r2cx-5xgj , EUVD-2022-0473

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.9%
EPSS 2.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 87%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Marked is a markdown parser and compiler. Prior to version 4.0.10, the regular expression `inline.reflinkSearch` may cause catastrophic backtracking against some strings and lead to a denial of service (DoS). Anyone who runs untrusted markdown through a vulnerable version of marked and does not use a worker with a time limit may be affected. This issue is patched in version 4.0.10. As a workaround, avoid running untrusted markdown through marked or run marked on a worker thread and set a reasonable time limit to prevent draining resources.

Patch / fix

  • npm marked 4.0.10
  • marked_project marked 4.0.10
  • node-marked Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.0.12+ds+~4.0.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2022-21681

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-2022-21681 updated cvss 7.5

marked: regular expression inline.reflinkSearch may lead Denial of Service

  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 servicemesh-grafana, servicemesh-grafana-prometheus
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.1 servicemesh-grafana Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2 rhacm2/console-rhel8
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 rhceph/rhceph-5-dashboard-rhel8
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 389-ds-base, cockpit-389-ds, python3-lib389, 389-ds-base-libs, 389-ds-base-snmp, 389-ds-base-legacy-tools Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 librbd1, librados2
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Integration Data Virtualisation Operator marked Red Hat Integration Service Registry marked Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 7 marked
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat OpenShift GitOps openshift-gitops-1/argocd-rhel8
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat Ceph Storage 6.1 Tools rhceph/rhceph-6-dashboard-rhel9 6-75
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2023:3642
  • Red Hat build of Apicurio Registry 2 marked Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 ceph, cephadm, librbd1, librgw2, rbd-nbd, ceph-mds, +33 more Red Hat Ceph Storage 6.1 Tools rhceph/rhceph-6-rhel9 6-177, rhceph/keepalived-rhel9 2.2.4-3, rhceph/snmp-notifier-rhel9 1.2.1-36, rhceph/rhceph-haproxy-rhel9 2.4.17-4, rhceph/rhceph-promtail-rhel9 v2.4.0-5 Red Hat Data Grid 8 marked Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 cockpit, grafana, cockpit-ws, cockpit-pcp, grafana-loki, grafana-mssql, +18 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 grafana, grafana-selinux
    +5 more products
    Red Hat Fuse 7 marked Red Hat Integration Camel K 1 marked Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 marked Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Expansion Pack marked Red Hat Single Sign-On 7 marked
    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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
18 mo ago

Exploit prediction

2.89% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 87% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/markedjs/marked/security/advisories/GHSA-5v2h-r2cx-5xgj referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm marked
<4.0.10
4.0.10

Affected products

  • markedjs marked

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

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.