Reported

July 8, 2021

Issued

July 8, 2021 (last modified: June 13, 2023)

Package

ammonia (crates.io)

Type

Vulnerability

Categories

• format-injection

Keywords

#html #xss

Aliases

• CVE-2021-38193
• GHSA-5325-xw5m-phm3

References

• https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/142

Patched

• >=3.1.0
• >=2.1.3, <3.0.0

Description

Affected versions of this crate did not account for namespace-related parsing differences between HTML, SVG, and MathML. Even if the svg and math elements are not allowed, the underlying HTML parser still treats them differently. Running cleanup without accounting for these differing namespaces resulted in an "impossible" DOM, which appeared "safe" when examining the DOM tree, but when serialized and deserialized, could be exploited to inject arbitrary markup.

To exploit this, the application using this library must allow a tag that is parsed as raw text in HTML. These elements are:

• title
• textarea
• xmp
• iframe
• noembed
• noframes
• plaintext
• noscript
• style
• script

Applications that do not explicitly allow any of these tags should not be affected, since none are allowed by default.

Advisory available under CC0-1.0 license.