🛡️ Sentinel: [CRITICAL] Fix pdflatex RCE and DoS mitigation in PDF compilation

[anchapin]

🚨 Severity: CRITICAL

💡 Vulnerability:
The PDF compilation functions in cli/pdf/converter.py and cli/generators/cover_letter_generator.py executed pdflatex and pandoc without strict sandboxing (-no-shell-escape) and without timeouts in their subprocess.communicate() calls.

🎯 Impact:

• Remote Code Execution (RCE): Malicious user input or AI-hallucinated LaTeX control macros (e.g., \write18{...}) could execute arbitrary shell commands on the host system because LaTeX shells are permitted by default.
• Denial of Service (DoS): Without a timeout on communicate(), maliciously crafted .tex files designed to loop infinitely could hang the compilation process indefinitely, leading to resource exhaustion.

🔧 Fix:

• Appended the -no-shell-escape flag to the primary pdflatex calls and --pdf-engine-opt=-no-shell-escape to the fallback pandoc calls.
• Implemented a 30-second timeout on all subprocess.communicate() calls, gracefully catching subprocess.TimeoutExpired, terminating the hung process (kill()), clearing the buffers, and returning False without raising unhandled exceptions or halting application flow.

✅ Verification:

• Extensive timeout and argument unit tests were added to tests/test_pdf_security.py to ensure complete coverage of both PDFConverter and CoverLetterGenerator implementations.
• All format, lint, and core tests passed securely.

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PR created automatically by Jules for task 5904571803552083737 started by @anchapin

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