HedgeDoc: Denial-of-service via YAML alias expansion in note frontmatter

published 2026-07-13 3 mo ago modified 2026-07-14 3 mo ago also EUVD-2026-43572

cvss: 8.3; version 4.0, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.4%; EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 34%
public exploits: 0; none known

HedgeDoc is an open source, real-time, collaborative, markdown notes application. Prior to version 1.11.0, HedgeDoc was vulnerable to a YAML alias bomb due to unsafe processing of the note frontmatter. HedgeDoc parsed frontmatter with js-yaml.load (js-yaml v3) via @hedgedoc/meta-marked, which resolved YAML anchor aliases. A compact malicious payload could therefore expand into a huge object structure, consuming excessive CPU. This expansion ran on every request to the publish view (/s/<shortid>) and, when placed under the opengraph key, the editor view (/<noteId>). A ten-level alias bomb could block the single Node.js event loop for roughly 235 seconds per request, causing concurrent requests to hang or drop and rendering the instance unavailable (DoS). Because the note was stored in the database, the impact survived process restarts until the note was removed. toobusy-js did not reliably mitigate the worst cases, as the event loop was saturated before the middleware could respond. This issue was fixed in version 1.11.0.

Patch / fix

links 1

github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc@c489497 commit

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical impact: partial
Assessed: 3 mo ago (2026-07-14)

Exploit prediction

0.40% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 34% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	4.0	8.3	CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H
CNA	4.0	8.3	CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:H/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Affected products

hedgedoc hedgedoc

Classification

Weakness

CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)

References

Sources

CVE List CVE-2026-58486
NVD CVE-2026-58486

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.

Summary