[CRITICAL BUG] Inject any html/css/js by using KaTeX

[mirik-k]

Please contact me to arsen.stahanov@gmail.com

[kevinbarabash]

@ArStah would you be willing to submit this using hackerone.com?

[mirik-k]

@kevinbarabash i can't find your organization there

[kevinbarabash]

@ArStah it should be listed as Khan Academy.

[mirik-k]

Look here what happens. Maybe it's not KaTeX issue, but i think you must check it

[kevinbarabash]

This is appears to be a gitter issue. It looks like they aren't properly sanitizing math input from users.

[edemaine]

Hard to tell without more information, but I imagine if there's any input to katex.render/katex.renderToString that can output a <script> tag, that'd be a bug in KaTeX. (Of course, gitter also shouldn't be relying on this, and should be sanitizing the output of KaTeX too... I certainly do this in my own project, though it'd be helpful to have guidelines for what to whitelist for KaTeX to work.) @kevinbarabash Are you suggesting that's not the case, and it's some other workaround that avoids calling KaTeX?

[kevinbarabash]

The KaTeX parser fails on the given input, e.g.

KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '\<' at position 3:  \<̲iframe src="ja:  \

[pascalwhoop]

Yes I also believe it shouldn't be positioned in KaTeX although it could be "good" to help people who add this library to help themselves by sanitizing against any html inside of KaTeX. Or is there any use case where people have html>KaTeX>html?

[kevinbarabash]

@pascalwhoop could you expand on what you mean by html>KaTeX>html?

[pascalwhoop]

Ah sorry. Usually you nest KaTeX code inside of html right? So let's say we use

<p>$$ f(x) = y^2 $$</p>

is there any reason why we should have it be something like

<p>$$ f(x) = y^2 <em>\text{chickens}</em> $$</p>

If not, then forbidding any html inside the string that is passed to katex.render could help developers help themselves. A bit. Because it helps avoid breaking out of the <pre><code> boxes

[kevinbarabash]

We already "forbid" HTML inside the string we pass to katex.render b/c it's not valid LaTeX`.

[pascalwhoop]

Okay then how exactly does it occur, that the HTML breaks out? I guess you forbid it, throw an error and the string is output to the UI of the client, which then is in fact our HTML that got injected?

[kevinbarabash]

KaTeX autorender extension only looks at the $$...$$ that are on the page. If they contain malicious code, once they've been added to the page it's too late.

[pascalwhoop]

Yes and no.
Gitter probably sanitizes their posts and ensures there is no html in there. But for some reason they exclude the contents of KaTeX and don't turn < into < . Probably because they don't want to mess with the code that's intended to be interpreted by KaTeX.

The error thrown by KaTeX parser then is also not sanitized. The error is thrown on the client side and there is no client side wrapping of the error, sanitizing it. But you could sanitize the Error you throw so users don't have to.

[edemaine]

I would hope/expect Gitter isn't using the autorender extension, but rather calling katex.renderToString before rendering the LaTeX source to DOM. Can anyone confirm/deny this?

@pascalwhoop I don't see why the error needs to be sanitized by KaTeX. No KaTeX code will render the error to HTML. At worst, it is printed as a console message.

I definitely don't understand how the leakage of HTML is happening. Feel free to email me details so I can investigate.

[pascalwhoop]

@edemaine has been contacted by the Gitter team. Gitter renders the KaTeX error as unsanitized HTML, which causes the trouble. I guess to give the user some feedback of what's not working.
I vote for close.
thanks for the triage

[mirik-k]

@pascalwhoop 👍

[edemaine]

Cool, glad we could help track it down. To help avoid this in the future, I've added a paragraph to the README talking about what's safe and what isn't in PR #1161. Reading it over and critiquing would be appreciated!

[MadLittleMods]

@edemaine Thanks for the email response earlier ❤️

The situation has been remedied and there is a blog post here, http://blog.gitter.im/2018/02/16/gitter-xss-cryptocoin-mining-security-issue-notification/

[mirik-k]

@MadLittleMods great, thanks for quick reaction 👍