GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io
GHSA-4w5h-hx6r-28q7 ratex-parser has unbounded parser recursion that leads to stack overflow (process abort)
MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-53531
- Ecosystem
- crates.io
- Packages
- ratex-parser
- Severity
- Moderate
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400, CWE-674
- Reviewed
- 2026-07-07
Affected packages
• crates.io ratex-parser: < 0.1.11 → fixed in 0.1.11
Description
Summary
RaTeX’s recursive-descent parser recurses one (or more) native stack frame per nesting level at `{`, `\left`, `\sqrt{`, `^{`, etc, with no maximum depth limit. A short, ~10 KB input of nested groups overflows the 8 MB main-thread stack and aborts the process. With `panic = "abort"` (`Cargo.toml:48`), and because a Rust stack overflow is always a fatal `SIGABRT` regardless of panic strategy this is an unrecoverable, whole-process denial of service reachable from a single untrusted LaTeX string.
Details
The mutual recursion has no depth guard (`crates/ratex-parser/src/parser.rs`):
```
parse_expression (:113) -> parse_atom (:281/285) -> parse_group (:451)
^ |
| on '{' (:459) recurse |
+--------------------------+
```
`\left` adds another recursive edge: `handle_left` → `parse_expression` (`crates/ratex-parser/src/functions/left_right.rs:47`). The only counters present are unrelated to depth: `leftright_depth` (a `\right`-matching counter, `parser.rs:24`) and the macro expander’s `max_expand = 1000` (`macro_expander.rs:64`), which does not gate brace / `\left` recursion (those tokens never pass through `expand_once`). There is no `recursion_limit`/depth parameter on `parse_group`, `parse_expression`, or `parse_atom`.
PoC
```
$ python3 -c 'import sys;sys.stdout.write("{"*200000+"x"+"}"*200000)' | ./target/release/parse
thread 'main' has overflowed its stack
fatal runtime error: stack overflow, aborting
Aborted (core dumped) # exit 134
```
(Other nesting forms work equally, e.g. `\left(`×N, `\sqrt{`×N, `^{`×N.)
Impact
A single small request crashes the whole RaTeX process. In a typical server-side math-rendering service this is a reliable, unauthenticated DoS; on smaller worker-thread stacks (e.g. a 512 KB async runtime thread) only a few hundred bytes of nesting are required.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-53531 RaTeX is a KaTeX-compatible math rendering engine written in Rust. vulnerability