GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io

GHSA-4w5h-hx6r-28q7 ratex-parser has unbounded parser recursion that leads to stack overflow (process abort)

MEDIUM Published 2026-07-07 Modified 2026-07-07 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

Weakness · CWE (2)

  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption weakness
  • CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion weakness

References