Security Resilience

CVE-2026-53428

Published
29 June 2026
Modified
29 June 2026
CVSS Score v4 6.9
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/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
EPSS Score 0.0019 8th percentile
Risk Priority 32 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2026-53428 is a medium-severity Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value (CWE-789) vulnerability in Erlef (inferred from references). Its CVSS base score is 6.9 (Medium).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Endpoint Denial of Service (T1499); ranked at the 8th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SI-10 (Information Input Validation) and SC-6 (Resource Availability) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in leandrocp mdex allows an unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service through unbounded memory allocation. comrak_nif::lumis_adapter::LumisAdapter::parse_highlight_lines in native/comrak_nif/src/lumis_adapter.rs eagerly expands a user-controlled inclusive line range from a fenced code block's highlight_lines…

more

decorator into a Vec<usize>, pushing one element per integer in the range with no upper bound on the range size. An attacker who can supply Markdown that an application renders with MDEx.to_html/2 (for example a comment, chat message, or wiki page) can embed a code block whose info string is rust highlight_lines="1-100000000", forcing the native adapter to allocate roughly 8 bytes per line in the range. A payload that differs by only a few bytes can therefore allocate hundreds of megabytes, and a sufficiently large range (for example 1-2000000000) exhausts host memory and aborts the BEAM, denying service to every user of the rendering process. The per-line write loop additionally tests membership with a linear scan over the same vector, degrading rendering to a quadratic cost even for ranges that do not immediately exhaust memory. The vulnerable native code originally shipped inside mdex (in native/comrak_nif/src/lumis_adapter.rs) and was later extracted into the separate mdex_native package (native/mdex_native_nif/src/lumis_adapter.rs), where it remains unpatched. This issue affects mdex from 0.11.0 before 0.12.3, and mdex_native from 0.1.0 before 0.2.3.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1499 Endpoint Denial of Service Impact
Adversaries may perform Endpoint Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to degrade or block the availability of services to users.
T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood Impact
Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2026-78861Shared CWE-789
CVE-2026-26931Shared CWE-789
CVE-2023-30837Shared CWE-789
CVE-2026-25780Shared CWE-789
CVE-2025-29491Shared CWE-789
CVE-2026-40378Shared CWE-789
CVE-2021-47971Shared CWE-789
CVE-2025-2518Shared CWE-789
CVE-2025-12983Shared CWE-789
CVE-2026-44967Shared CWE-789

Affected Assets

Erlef
—
inferred from references and description; NVD did not file a CPE for this CVE

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

Input validation directly rejects or bounds untrusted size values before any allocation occurs.

Resource quotas and priority allocation limit the system-wide impact of an oversized request.

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

PR.PS-06 mostly match
blocks

Secure SDLC practices directly prevent coding flaws that trust unvalidated size values for allocations.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

finds

Security testing in development can detect and block excessive allocation flaws before deployment.

prevents

Secure coding standards directly prohibit allocating memory from untrusted size values without validation.

References