CVE-2026-53428

Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value vulnerability in leandrocp mdex allows an unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service through unbounded memory allocation.

comraknif::lumisadapter::LumisAdapter::parsehighlightlines in native/comraknif/src/lumisadapter.rs eagerly expands a user-controlled inclusive line range from a fenced code block's highlightlines 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.tohtml/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/comraknif/src/lumisadapter.rs) and was later extracted into the separate mdexnative package (native/mdexnativenif/src/lumisadapter.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.