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attack-surface.md

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Attack Surface Analysis for textualize/rich

Attack Surface: 1. Rich Text Markup Injection

  • Description: Vulnerability arising from parsing and rendering user-controlled input as rich text markup (Rich markup, Markdown, BBCode) without proper sanitization. Malicious markup can be injected to cause significant unintended behavior.
  • How Rich Contributes to the Attack Surface: rich's core functionality is to interpret and render rich text markup. If user input is directly passed to rich's rendering functions without sanitization, it becomes highly susceptible to markup injection attacks.
  • Example:
    • Scenario: A critical system monitoring application uses rich to display alerts and system status based on data that includes user-provided descriptions. User input is directly rendered using rich.print().
    • Malicious Input: An attacker injects data containing: [blink][bold][red]CRITICAL ALERT:[/red][/bold][/blink] System compromised. [link=https://fake-admin-login.example.com]Login here to resolve![/link]
    • Rendered Output: rich renders this, displaying a highly alarming, blinking, bold, red "CRITICAL ALERT" with a link to a phishing login page, potentially misleading administrators and causing them to compromise credentials. More complex markup could cause resource exhaustion leading to DoS of the monitoring system display.
  • Impact:
    • High Severity Misinformation/Social Engineering: Malicious markup can be used to inject misleading or false information into critical displays, leading to incorrect decisions or social engineering attacks (e.g., phishing links in alerts).
    • Denial of Service (DoS): Injecting excessively complex or deeply nested markup can consume significant processing resources, leading to performance degradation or application crashes in critical systems relying on rich for output.
  • Risk Severity: High
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Strict Input Sanitization: Implement robust sanitization of all user-provided input before it is passed to rich for rendering. This should include removing or escaping all potentially harmful markup tags and attributes. Assume all user input is untrusted.
    • Markup Allowlisting (Strict): If rich text formatting is necessary for user input, define a very strict allowlist of permitted markup tags and attributes. Only render markup that strictly conforms to this allowlist. Reject or escape anything outside the allowlist.
    • Contextual Output Encoding: Consider encoding user input for safe display within rich contexts, even if some formatting is lost. Prioritize security over rich formatting for untrusted input.
    • Security Audits of Input Handling: Regularly audit the code paths where user input is processed and rendered by rich to ensure sanitization and validation are effective and consistently applied.

Attack Surface: 2. Denial of Service via Excessive Output Generation

  • Description: An attacker can manipulate input to cause rich to generate an extremely large volume of output, leading to resource exhaustion and denial of service, especially in server-side applications or resource-constrained environments.
  • How Rich Contributes to the Attack Surface: rich is designed to create visually rich and potentially verbose output. Uncontrolled or maliciously crafted input can exploit rich's output generation capabilities to create massive output streams.
  • Example:
    • Scenario: A server-side application uses rich to log and display detailed processing information based on user requests.
    • Malicious Input: An attacker crafts a request that triggers the application to process a very large dataset or enter an infinite loop in output generation logic when using rich to display progress or results.
    • Result: rich attempts to render an extremely large amount of output to the server's console or logs. This can lead to:
      • Server Resource Exhaustion: Excessive CPU and memory usage on the server due to output generation and handling.
      • Application Slowdown/Unresponsiveness: The application becomes slow or unresponsive due to resource contention.
      • Log Flooding: Logs become flooded with massive output, making it difficult to analyze legitimate events and potentially filling up disk space.
  • Impact:
    • High Severity Denial of Service (DoS): Application or server becomes unavailable or severely degraded due to resource exhaustion caused by excessive rich output generation.
    • Operational Disruption: Log flooding and performance degradation can disrupt normal operations and monitoring.
  • Risk Severity: High (in server-side and resource-constrained scenarios)
  • Mitigation Strategies:
    • Output Volume Limiting (Critical): Implement strict limits on the volume of output generated by rich, especially when processing user-controlled input. Set maximum output line counts or character limits. Truncate or summarize output if limits are exceeded.
    • Paging and Buffering: For potentially large outputs, implement paging or buffering mechanisms to avoid generating and displaying the entire output at once. Display output in manageable chunks.
    • Rate Limiting and Input Validation: Implement rate limiting on user requests that trigger rich output generation. Validate user input to prevent requests that could lead to excessive output.
    • Resource Monitoring and Throttling: Monitor server resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O) related to rich output generation. Implement throttling mechanisms to limit output generation if resource usage exceeds safe thresholds.
    • Asynchronous Output Generation: Consider offloading rich output generation to asynchronous tasks or background processes to prevent blocking the main application thread and mitigate DoS impact on core application functionality.