Micropatching Brings the Abandoned Equation Editor Back to Life (2018)

Summary

How We Security-Adopted a Terminated Software Product by Mitja Kolsek, the 0patch Team Intro A few days ago Microsoft's update removed Equation Editor from Microsoft Office, the official reason being "security issues with its implementation." Most Office users couldn't care less about this removal, but if you've been happily using Equation Editor to edit Word documents with mathematical formulas just days ago, you suddenly can't do that anymore. You will still see your formulas in the document but you won't be able to edit them. Instead you'll get this: We have no idea how many users are affected, but Twitter user @glyph raises an interesting point that those who work with Equation Editor may be tempted to forego this Office update - and by extension all future Office updates -, which will leave them vulnerable to exploits published in the future. Worse even, affected users may decide to migrate back to unsupported versions of Office that don't receive security updates at all. This user, for instance, reports going back to Office 2000 on his Windows 10 computer. Office 2000 stopped receiving security updates in 2009. Microsoft suggested affected users can "edit Equation Editor 3.0 equations without security issues" with Wiris Suite's MathType, a commercial application that costs $97 ($57 academic). They did not specify the basis upon which the phrase "without security issues" was provided, but MathType seems to have a clean public security record so far. Which doesn't say much as that was also true for Equation Editor until someone opened its hood. We haven't tested MathType and can't tell how easy it is to start using it instead of Equation Editor with existing Word documents, but we don't particularly like the idea of suddenly deleting from users' computers a tool they might be using, and sending them to a store to buy a replacement. Microsoft's unwillingness to continue supporting Equation Editor is understandable. Their manual patching of its recently discovered...