CVE-2021-41168

Vulnerability Description

Snudown is a reddit-specific fork of the Sundown Markdown parser used by GitHub, with Python integration added. In affected versions snudown was found to be vulnerable to denial of service attacks to its reference table implementation. References written in markdown ` [reference_name]: https://www.example.com` are inserted into a hash table which was found to have a weak hash function, meaning that an attacker can reliably generate a large number of collisions for it. This makes the hash table vulnerable to a hash-collision DoS attack, a type of algorithmic complexity attack. Further the hash table allowed for duplicate entries resulting in long retrieval times. Proofs of concept and further discussion of the hash collision issue are discussed on the snudown GHSA(https://github.com/reddit/snudown/security/advisories/GHSA-6gvv-9q92-w5f6). Users are advised to update to version 1.7.0.

CVSS Score

Affected Products

Related Weaknesses (CWE)

References

• https://github.com/reddit/snudown/commit/1ac2c130b210539ee1e5d67a7bac93f9d8007c0PatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/reddit/snudown/security/advisories/GHSA-6gvv-9q92-w5f6ExploitThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/reddit/snudown/commit/1ac2c130b210539ee1e5d67a7bac93f9d8007c0PatchThird Party Advisory
• https://github.com/reddit/snudown/security/advisories/GHSA-6gvv-9q92-w5f6ExploitThird Party Advisory