CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2024-28244 — KaTeX is a JavaScript library for TeX math rendering on the web
KaTeX is a JavaScript library for TeX math rendering on the web. KaTeX users who render untrusted mathematical expressions could encounter malicious input using `\def` or `\newcommand` that causes a near-infinite loop, despite setting `maxExpand` to avoid such loops. KaTeX supports an option named maxExpand which aims to prevent infinitely recursive macros from consuming all available memory and/or triggering a stack overflow error. Unfortunately, support for "Unicode (sub|super)script characters" allows an attacker to bypass this limit. Each sub/superscript group instantiated a separate Parser with its own limit on macro executions, without inheriting the current count of macro executions from its parent. This has been corrected in KaTeX v0.16.10.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2024-03-25
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- javascript/npm
- Weaknesses
- CWE-674
Affected products
- katex / katex
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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