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Attack Surface Analysis for charmbracelet/bubbletea

Attack Surface: Unsanitized User Input in View (Terminal Escape Sequence Injection)

  • Description: User-provided data, if not properly sanitized, can be injected into the terminal output, potentially leading to terminal escape sequence injection.
  • Bubble Tea Contribution: The View function in bubbletea is responsible for generating the string output rendered to the terminal. This is the direct point of vulnerability, as bubbletea handles the rendering process.
  • Example: An attacker provides a username containing ANSI escape codes: User<ESC>[2J<ESC>[H<ESC>[?25lMyEvilCommand. If this is directly rendered in the View (which bubbletea controls), it could clear the screen, move the cursor, hide the cursor, and potentially execute MyEvilCommand.
  • Impact: Arbitrary command execution, data exfiltration, terminal manipulation, denial of service.
  • Risk Severity: Critical.
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Developer:
      • Strict Sanitization: Never directly embed unsanitized user input into the View output. Use a dedicated sanitization function to escape or remove all potentially harmful characters, especially control characters and escape sequences. A simple strings.ReplaceAll is not sufficient. Consider a whitelist approach.
      • Templating (with Sanitization): If using a templating system, ensure it also performs robust sanitization before rendering.
      • Avoid Direct Display: If possible, avoid displaying user-supplied data directly. If you must, display a sanitized/truncated version.
      • Specialized Libraries: Explore libraries for safe terminal output, but vet them thoroughly.

Attack Surface: Malicious tea.Msg Payloads (Input Validation)

  • Description: Attackers can craft malicious messages of custom or built-in tea.Msg types, containing data designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the Update function.
  • Bubble Tea Contribution: bubbletea's message-passing system (tea.Msg) is the core mechanism for handling input. Every message type and its data are potential attack vectors because bubbletea defines this input mechanism.
  • Example: A custom message UpdateProfileMsg with a Bio field (string). An attacker sends a message with an extremely long Bio, attempting a buffer overflow or DoS. If the Bio is later used in a tea.Cmd, it could lead to command injection.
  • Impact: Denial of service, application crashes, potentially arbitrary code execution (if message data is used unsafely), data corruption.
  • Risk Severity: High to Critical (depends on how message data is used).
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Developer:
      • Strict Type Checking: Use appropriate data types for message fields.
      • Input Validation: Validate all data within every message type: length checks, range checks, format validation, content validation (sanitization).
      • Defensive Programming: Handle potential errors gracefully in the Update function. Assume message data is malicious.
      • Fuzz Testing: Use fuzz testing to send a wide range of unexpected message data.

Attack Surface: Command Injection via tea.Cmd

  • Description: If the application uses tea.Cmd to execute external commands, and those commands are constructed using user-supplied data, this creates a command injection vulnerability.
  • Bubble Tea Contribution: bubbletea provides the tea.Cmd mechanism for executing external commands. While command injection is a general vulnerability, bubbletea's tea.Cmd is the direct interface that would be misused.
  • Example: tea.Cmd(exec.Command("editor", filename)), where filename comes from user input. An attacker provides "; rm -rf /; #" as the filename.
  • Impact: Arbitrary command execution, complete system compromise.
  • Risk Severity: Critical.
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Developer:
      • Avoid User Input in Commands: Best practice: avoid using user data to build commands. Use fixed commands/parameters.
      • Strict Whitelisting: If unavoidable, use a strict whitelist of allowed values.
      • Secure Command Construction: If you must use user input, use a library designed for secure command construction. Never concatenate strings.
      • Sandboxing: Consider sandboxing to limit command privileges.