Previous versions of tracing-subscriber were vulnerable to ANSI escape sequence injection attacks. Untrusted user input containing ANSI escape sequences could be injected into terminal output when logged, potentially allowing attackers to:

• Manipulate terminal title bars
• Clear screens or modify terminal display
• Potentially mislead users through terminal manipulation

In isolation, impact is minimal, however security issues have been found in terminal emulators that enabled an attacker to use ANSI escape sequences via logs to exploit vulnerabilities in the terminal emulator.

This was patched in PR #3368 to escape ANSI control characters from user input.

Impact

When user-provided input is provided to any type that parses with the RFC 2822 format, a denial of service attack via stack exhaustion is possible. The attack relies on formally deprecated and rarely-used features that are part of the RFC 2822 format used in a malicious manner. Ordinary, non-malicious input will never encounter this scenario.

Patches

A limit to the depth of recursion was added in v0.3.47. From this version, an error will be returned rather than exhausting the stack.

Workarounds

Limiting the length of user input is the simplest way to avoid stack exhaustion, as the amount of the stack consumed would be at most a factor of the length of the input.

The following SVG will produce a link with a javascript scheme. If the user clicks this link, they will run it.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <a>
    <set attributeName="href" to="javascript:alert('SET_XSS')"></set>
    <text y="30">Click set</text>
  </a>
</svg>

Ammonia did not apply attribute filters based on attributeName, so the contents of the to, from, and values tags were not sanitized as URLs.

Applications that do not explicitly allow either of these tags should not be affected, since neither are allowed by default.

Discovered by: Younghun Ko (@koyokr)