GHSA-5478-66c3-rhxr

isRepeatedSingleCharRun() in src/analysis.ts (line 285) re-scans the entire accumulated segment on every merge iteration during text analysis, producing O(n²) total work for input consisting of repeated identical punctuation characters. An attacker who controls text passed to prepare() can block the main thread for ~20 seconds with 80KB of input (e.g., "(".repeat(80_000)).

Tested against commit 9364741d3562fcc65aacc50953e867a5cb9fdb23 (v0.0.4) on Node.js v24.12.0, Windows x64.

A standalone PoC and detailed write-up are attached below.

Root Cause

The buildMergedSegmentation() function (line 795) processes text segments produced by Intl.Segmenter. When consecutive non-word-like segments consist of the same single character (e.g., (, [, !, #), the code merges them into one growing segment (line 859):

// analysis.ts:849-859 - the merge branch inside the build loop
} else if (
  isText &&
  !piece.isWordLike &&
  mergedLen > 0 &&
  mergedKinds[mergedLen - 1] === 'text' &&
  piece.text.length === 1 &&
  piece.text !== '-' &&
  piece.text !== '—' &&
  isRepeatedSingleCharRun(mergedTexts[mergedLen - 1]!, piece.text)  // <- O(n) per call
) {
  mergedTexts[mergedLen - 1] += piece.text  // append to accumulator

Before each merge, it calls isRepeatedSingleCharRun() (line 857) to verify that ALL characters in the accumulated segment match the new character:

// analysis.ts:285-291
function isRepeatedSingleCharRun(segment: string, ch: string): boolean {
  if (segment.length === 0) return false
  for (const part of segment) {    // <- Iterates ENTIRE accumulated string
    if (part !== ch) return false
  }
  return true
}

Intl.Segmenter with granularity: 'word' produces individual non-word segments for each punctuation character. For a string of N identical punctuation characters, the merge check is called N times. On the k-th call, the accumulated segment is k characters long, so...