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Fix cubic ReDoS in fenced code and references
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Two regular expressions were vulerable to Regular Expression Denial of
Service (ReDoS).

Crafted strings containing a long sequence of spaces could cause Denial
of Service by making markdown take a long time to process.
This represents a vulnerability when untrusted user input is processed
with the markdown package.

ReferencesProcessor:

https://github.com/Python-Markdown/markdown/blob/4acb949256adc535d6e6cd8/markdown/blockprocessors.py#L559-L563

e.g.:

```python
import markdown
markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 4321 + '0')
```

FencedBlockPreprocessor (requires fenced_code extension):

https://github.com/Python-Markdown/markdown/blob/a11431539d08e14b0bd821c/markdown/extensions/fenced_code.py#L43-L54

e.g.:

```python
import markdown
markdown.markdown('```' + ' ' * 4321, extensions=['fenced_code'])
```

Both regular expressions had cubic worst-case complexity, so doubling
the number of spaces made processing take 8 times as long.
The cubic behaviour can be seen as follows:

```
$ time python -c "import markdown; markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 1000 + '0')"
python -c "import markdown; markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 1000 + '0')"  1.25s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.271 total
$ time python -c "import markdown; markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 2000 + '0')"
python -c "import markdown; markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 2000 + '0')"  9.01s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 9.040 total
$ time python -c "import markdown; markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 4000 + '0')"
python -c "import markdown; markdown.markdown('[]:0' + ' ' * 4000 + '0')"  74.86s user 0.27s system 99% cpu 1:15.38 total
```

Both regexes had three `[ ]*` groups separated by optional groups, in
effect making the regex `[ ]*[ ]*[ ]*`.

Discovered using [regexploit](https://github.com/doyensec/regexploit).
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b-c-ds authored and waylan committed May 7, 2021
1 parent 4acb949 commit eacff47
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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion markdown/blockprocessors.py
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -559,7 +559,7 @@ def run(self, parent, blocks):
class ReferenceProcessor(BlockProcessor):
""" Process link references. """
RE = re.compile(
r'^[ ]{0,3}\[([^\]]*)\]:[ ]*\n?[ ]*([^\s]+)[ ]*\n?[ ]*((["\'])(.*)\4|\((.*)\))?[ ]*$', re.MULTILINE
r'^[ ]{0,3}\[([^\]]*)\]:[ ]*\n?[ ]*([^\s]+)[ ]*(?:\n[ ]*)?((["\'])(.*)\4[ ]*|\((.*)\)[ ]*)?$', re.MULTILINE
)

def test(self, parent, block):
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14 changes: 7 additions & 7 deletions markdown/extensions/fenced_code.py
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -42,13 +42,13 @@ def extendMarkdown(self, md):
class FencedBlockPreprocessor(Preprocessor):
FENCED_BLOCK_RE = re.compile(
dedent(r'''
(?P<fence>^(?:~{3,}|`{3,}))[ ]* # opening fence
((\{(?P<attrs>[^\}\n]*)\})?| # (optional {attrs} or
(\.?(?P<lang>[\w#.+-]*))?[ ]* # optional (.)lang
(hl_lines=(?P<quot>"|')(?P<hl_lines>.*?)(?P=quot))?) # optional hl_lines)
[ ]*\n # newline (end of opening fence)
(?P<code>.*?)(?<=\n) # the code block
(?P=fence)[ ]*$ # closing fence
(?P<fence>^(?:~{3,}|`{3,}))[ ]* # opening fence
((\{(?P<attrs>[^\}\n]*)\})| # (optional {attrs} or
(\.?(?P<lang>[\w#.+-]*)[ ]*)? # optional (.)lang
(hl_lines=(?P<quot>"|')(?P<hl_lines>.*?)(?P=quot)[ ]*)?) # optional hl_lines)
\n # newline (end of opening fence)
(?P<code>.*?)(?<=\n) # the code block
(?P=fence)[ ]*$ # closing fence
'''),
re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL | re.VERBOSE
)
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