- Description: An attacker sends specially crafted escape sequences within text displayed in Alacritty. These sequences exploit parsing vulnerabilities in Alacritty's terminal emulator, causing it to crash, hang, or become unresponsive. The attacker might inject these sequences through user input fields, external data sources displayed in the terminal, or by manipulating application output that is rendered by Alacritty.
- Impact: Application denial of service, preventing users from accessing or using the application's terminal functionality. Potentially system instability if Alacritty consumes excessive resources before crashing.
- Affected Alacritty Component: Terminal Emulator Core (Escape Sequence Parser, Renderer)
- Risk Severity: High
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Input Sanitization/Filtering: Carefully filter or sanitize any untrusted data displayed in Alacritty to remove or neutralize potentially malicious escape sequences. This is complex and may not be fully effective.
- Alacritty Version Updates: Keep Alacritty updated to the latest stable version to benefit from bug fixes and security patches that may address escape sequence vulnerabilities.
- Output Rate Limiting: Limit the rate of output displayed in Alacritty to mitigate resource exhaustion if a DoS attack involves flooding the terminal with output.
- Description: An attacker injects malicious escape sequences that exploit vulnerabilities in Alacritty's handling of terminal features. These sequences could be designed to leak sensitive information from Alacritty's memory, the application's environment variables, or potentially even data from the system clipboard if Alacritty's escape sequence handling is flawed. The attacker might achieve this by displaying crafted text from untrusted sources within the terminal window rendered by Alacritty.
- Impact: Confidentiality breach, potential exposure of sensitive application data, user credentials, or system information.
- Affected Alacritty Component: Terminal Emulator Core (Escape Sequence Parser, Memory Management, Feature Handlers)
- Risk Severity: High
- Mitigation Strategies:
- Input Sanitization/Filtering: Filter or sanitize untrusted input to remove or neutralize potentially malicious escape sequences.
- Alacritty Version Updates: Keep Alacritty updated to the latest version to patch potential information disclosure vulnerabilities.
- Principle of Least Privilege: Run the application and Alacritty with the minimum necessary privileges to limit the scope of potential information disclosure if a vulnerability is exploited.
- Code Review: Review application code that handles data displayed in Alacritty to ensure it doesn't inadvertently introduce vulnerabilities or expose sensitive information through the terminal.