Fulgur: Unbounded page slicing from attacker-controlled CSS height causes denial of serviceGHSA-j5cx-ph8g-95v3
HIGHFix: fulgur-rs/fulgur#501GHSA-j5cx-ph8g-95v3 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in fulgur. A fix is available for fulgur — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-j5cx-ph8g-95v3.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
fulgurReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
fulgur converts untrusted HTML/CSS into PDF, commonly on a server that
processes input supplied by many tenants. In versions prior to 0.19.0, a
body-direct child whose CSS-resolved height greatly exceeds the page height was
sliced into one fragment per page with no upper bound.
The height is taken directly from attacker-controlled HTML/CSS (height, vh
units), so a few bytes such as:
<div style="height:99999999px"></div>
forced on the order of 125,000 page fragments. The pagination code then
allocates vec![Vec::new(); page_count] and runs a per-page render loop,
resulting in CPU and memory exhaustion. A non-finite height (one that resolves
to +inf) additionally made the slicing loop's remaining -= last_slice_h
decrement never terminate, causing an infinite loop.
An attacker able to submit HTML/CSS to a fulgur-based conversion service can trigger this with a trivially small payload, denying service to the host and any co-tenants.
Patches
Fixed in 0.19.0. A MAX_PAGES cap bounds the slice loop — halting it even
for a +inf height — and non-finite layout heights are sanitized so they can no
longer drive the loop.
Workarounds
Upgrade to 0.19.0 or later. If upgrading is not immediately possible, validate
or constrain untrusted CSS (in particular height / vh on body-level
elements) before passing HTML to fulgur.
Attack Vector rationale
fulgur performs no network I/O of its own; it renders HTML/CSS handed to it by
the embedding application. This advisory scores the crate independent of any
specific adopting program, so per the CVSS v3.1 User Guide §3.7 (scoring library
vulnerabilities related to incoming data) the Attack Vector is assessed as
Network for the reasonable worst-case deployment — a network-facing service
that renders untrusted, attacker-supplied HTML without user interaction. A
concrete system that receives the HTML in one component and passes it to fulgur
in a separate component may assess a lower environmental Attack Vector (Local,
per §3.10).
References
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | fulgur | all versions | 0.19.0cargo update -p fulgur --precise 0.19.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for fulgur, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update fulgur to 0.19.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-j5cx-ph8g-95v3 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-j5cx-ph8g-95v3 in your dependencies?
Find it across crates.io, including transitive dependencies.