CVE-2024-28244: medium-severity vulnerability in KaTeX
KaTeX's maxExpand bypassed by Unicode sub/superscripts
Published · Updated
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.5epss 2.2%
KaTeX is a JavaScript library for TeX math rendering on the web. KaTeX users who render untrusted mathematical expressions could encounter malicious input using `\def` or `\newcommand` that causes a near-infinite loop, despite setting `maxExpand` to avoid such loops. KaTeX supports an option named maxExpand which aims to prevent infinitely recursive macros from consuming all available memory and/or triggering a stack overflow error. Unfortunately, support for "Unicode (sub|super)script characters" allows an attacker to bypass this limit. Each sub/superscript group instantiated a separate Parser with its own limit on macro executions, without inheriting the current count of macro executions from its parent. This has been corrected in KaTeX v0.16.10.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
KaTeX · KaTeXRelated CVEs — KaTeX
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-28243MEDIUMKaTeX's maxExpand bypassed by \edefEPSS 1.4%CVE-2025-23207MEDIUM\htmlData does not validate attribute names in KaTeXEPSS 0.4%CVE-2024-28246MEDIUMKaTeX is missing normalization of the protocol in URLs allows bypassing forbidden protocolsEPSS 0.4%CVE-2024-28245MEDIUMKaTeX's \includegraphics does not escape filenameEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-103923LOWKaTeX: Existing prototype pollution can bypass trust restrictionsEPSS 0.3%