CVE-2026-58486
HedgeDoc is an open source, real-time, collaborative, markdown notes application. Prior to version 1.11.0, HedgeDoc was vulnerable to a YAML alias bomb due to unsafe processing of the note frontmatter. HedgeDoc parsed frontmatter with js-yaml.load (js-yaml v3) via @hedgedoc/meta-marked, which resolved YAML anchor aliases. A compact malicious payload could therefore expand into a huge object structure, consuming excessive CPU. This expansion ran on every request to the publish view (/s/<shortid>) and, when placed under the opengraph key, the editor view (/<noteId>). A ten-level alias bomb could block the single Node.js event loop for roughly 235 seconds per request, causing concurrent requests to hang or drop and rendering the instance unavailable (DoS). Because the note was stored in the database, the impact survived process restarts until the note was removed. toobusy-js did not reliably mitigate the worst cases, as the event loop was saturated before the middleware could respond. This issue was fixed in version 1.11.0.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, with an ordinary user account and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can take the service offline. The impact spreads beyond the vulnerable component into other parts of the system.
- Weakness
- A request that is cheap for the attacker consumes unbounded resources on the server.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.