fkie_cve-2026-53531

2026-10-02T17:33:15.161420+00:00

RaTeX is a KaTeX-compatible math rendering engine written in Rust. Prior to version 0.1.11, 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. Version 0.1.11 fixes the issue.

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

2026-10-02T17:33:15.161513+00:00

Affected: crates.io: ratex-parser

### 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

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fkie_cve-2026-53531

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