markdown-it: Quadratic complexity DoS in smartquotes rule via replaceAt string operationsCVE-2026-48988

### Summary A quadratic time complexity vulnerability exists in markdown-it's smartquotes rule (enabled via the `typographer: true` option). An attacker can craft a markdown input consisting of consecutive quotation marks that causes the parser to consume excessive CPU time, leading to denial of service. ### Details The vulnerability is in the `replaceAt()` helper function used by the smartquotes rule in `lib/rules_core/smartquotes.mjs`: ```javascript function replaceAt (str, index, ch) { return str.slice(0, index) + ch + str.slice(index + 1) } ``` When markdown-it processes a text token containing many quotation marks (either `"` or `'`) with `typographer: true`, the smartquotes rule iterates through each quote character and calls `replaceAt()` to substitute it with a typographic (curly) quote. Each call to `replaceAt()` creates three new string slices and concatenates them, which is an O(n) operation where n is the length of the string. Since this is called once per quote character in the token, and there are n quote characters, the total time complexity becomes O(n^2). The root cause is that the smartquotes rule modifies `token.content` in place using string slicing rather than building the result incrementally. The `process_inlines()` function (line 14) processes each quote in the text token, and for matching quote pairs, calls `replaceAt()` on both the opening and closing token's content (lines 151-152). When the entire input is a single text token of quote characters, this results in quadratic behavior. ### PoC ```javascript const md = require('markdown-it'); const instance = md({ typographer: true }); // 160,000 consecutive double-quote characters const payload = '"'.repeat(160000); console.time('render'); instance.render(payload); console.timeEnd('render'); // Output: render: ~21000ms (21 seconds) // Compare with typographer disabled: const safe = md({ typographer: false }); console.time('render-safe'); safe.render(payload); console.timeEnd('render-safe'); // Output: render-safe: ~8ms ``` Measured timing on a modern system: - 10,000 quotes: ~19ms - 20,000 quotes: ~51ms - 40,000 quotes: ~212ms - 80,000 quotes: ~5,430ms - 160,000 quotes: ~21,198ms The scaling is clearly superlinear (quadratic), with the 80K->160K step showing a ~3.9x increase for a 2x input increase, consistent with O(n^2). ### Impact Applications that render user-supplied markdown with `typographer: true` are vulnerable to denial of service. An attacker can submit a relatively small payload (160KB of quote characters) that causes the server to spend over 21 seconds processing a single request. Repeated submissions can exhaust server CPU resources and prevent legitimate users from being served. The impact is mitigated by the fact that the `typographer` option defaults to `false` and must be explicitly enabled. However, the typographer feature is commonly enabled in production applications that want smart typography, and the markdown-it documentation prominently suggests enabling it. A suggested fix would be to replace the `replaceAt()` approach with an array-based or StringBuilder-style approach that collects all replacements and applies them in a single pass, reducing the time complexity to O(n).

Quoted source text, attributed separately from HOL analysis.