GHSA-547r-qmjm-8hvw
md-to-pdf vulnerable to arbitrary JavaScript code execution when parsing front matter
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
A Markdown front-matter block that contains JavaScript delimiter causes the JS engine in gray-matter library to execute arbitrary code in the Markdown to PDF converter process of **md-to-pdf** library, resulting in remote code execution.
### Details
**md-to-pdf** uses the gray-matter library to parse front-matter. Gray-matter exposes a JavaScript engine that, when enabled or triggered by certain front-matter delimiters (e.g. ---js or ---javascript), will evaluate the front-matter contents as JavaScript. If user-supplied Markdown is fed to md-to-pdf and the front-matter contains malicious JS, the converter process will execute that code.
### PoC
```
const { mdToPdf } = require('md-to-pdf');
var payload = '---javascript\n((require("child_process")).execSync("calc.exe"))\n---RCE';
(async () => {
await mdToPdf({ content: payload }, { dest: './output.pdf'});
})();
```
Running the PoC on Windows launches the calculator application, demonstrating arbitrary code execution.
### Impact
- Remote code execution in the process that performs Markdown->PDF conversion.
- If the converter is run in a web app or cloud service, an attacker uploading malicious Markdown can execute arbitrary commands on the
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.