Security fix:

After decoding numeric (\N) and one-character (\<, \> etc.)
character escape sequences, do not forget to HTML-encode the
resulting ASCII character.  Malicious manuals were able to smuggle
XSS content by roff-escaping the HTML-special characters they need.
That's a classic bug type in many web applications, actually...  :-(

Found myself while auditing the HTML formatter for safe output handling.

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/chars.c b/chars.c
index 1e9a186e..aee3fdf5 100644
--- a/chars.c
+++ b/chars.c
@@ -127,7 +127,18 @@ mchars_num2uc(const char *p, size_t sz)
 
 	if ((i = mandoc_strntoi(p, sz, 16)) < 0)
 		return('\0');
-	/* FIXME: make sure we're not in a bogus range. */
+
+	/*
+	 * Security warning:
+	 * Never extend the range of accepted characters
+	 * to overlap with the ASCII range, 0x00-0x7F
+	 * without re-auditing the callers of this function.
+	 * Some callers might relay on the fact that we never
+	 * return ASCII characters for their escaping decisions.
+	 *
+	 * XXX Code is missing here to exclude bogus ranges.
+	 */
+
 	return(i > 0x80 && i <= 0x10FFFF ? i : '\0');
 }