Resource exhaustion in Erweixin Ratex

CVE-2026-53530

RaTeX is a KaTeX-compatible math rendering engine written in Rust. Prior to version 0.1.11, the public parser entrypoint `ratex_parser::parse(&str)` panics on the 9-byte input `\verbéxé` (i.e. `\verb` followed by the non-ASCII delimiter `é`). When handling a `\verb` command, the parser slices the verbatim argument with byte indices (`arg[1..arg.len() - 1]`); if the delimiter character is multibyte UTF-8, index `1` lands inside that character and Rust panics with *“byte index 1 is not a char boundary”*. Because RaTeX’s release profile sets `panic = "abort"` (`Cargo.toml:48`), the panic aborts the entire process — not just the current request/thread — making this a hard denial of service for any service that renders untrusted LaTeX. Version 0.1.11 fixes the issue.

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.004 (34.9th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 35th percentile — 34.9% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-53530: held from 0.003 to 0.004.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.004 · change: +0.002

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References