GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3
JustHTML is vulnerable to XSS via code fence breakout in <pre> content
Quick fix
GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3 — justhtml: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.
pip install --upgrade 'justhtml>=1.13.0' Details
## Summary
`to_markdown()` is vulnerable when serializing attacker-controlled `<pre>` content. The `<pre>` handler emits a fixed three-backtick fenced code block, but writes decoded text content into that fence without choosing a delimiter longer than any backtick run inside the content.
An attacker can place backticks and HTML-like text inside a sanitized `<pre>` element so that the generated Markdown closes the fence early and leaves raw HTML outside the code block. When that Markdown is rendered by a CommonMark/GFM-style renderer that allows raw HTML, the HTML executes.
This is a bypass of the v1.12.0 Markdown hardening. That fix escaped HTML-significant characters for regular text nodes, but `<pre>` uses a separate serialization path and does not apply the same protection.
## Details
The vulnerable `<pre>` Markdown path:
- extracts decoded text from the `<pre>` subtree - opens a fenced block with a fixed delimiter of `````` - writes the decoded text directly into the output - closes with another fixed ``````
Because the fence length is fixed, attacker-controlled content containing a backtick run of length 3 or more can terminate the code block. If the content also contains decoded HTML-like text such as `<img ...>`, that text appears outside the fence in the resulting Markdown and is treated as raw HTML by downstream Markdown renderers.
The issue is not that HTML-like text appears inside code blocks. The issue is that the serializer allows attacker-controlled `<pre>` text to break out of the fixed fence.
## Reproduction
```python from justhtml import JustHTML
payload = "<pre>```\n<img src=x onerror=alert(1)></pre>" doc = JustHTML(payload, fragment=True) # default sanitize=True
print(doc.to_html(pretty=False)) # <pre>``` # <img src=x onerror=alert(1)></pre>
print(doc.to_markdown()) # ``` # ``` # <img src=x onerror=alert(1)> # ```
```
Rendered as CommonMark/GFM-style Markdown, that output is interpreted as:
1. Line 1 opens a fenced code block 2. Line 2 closes it 3. Line 3 is raw HTML outside the fence 4. Line 4 opens a new fence
## Impact
Applications that treat `JustHTML(..., sanitize=True).to_markdown()` output as safe for direct rendering in Markdown contexts may be exposed to XSS, depending on the downstream Markdown renderer's raw-HTML handling.
## Root Cause
The `<pre>` Markdown serializer uses a fixed fence instead of selecting a delimiter longer than the longest backtick run in the content.
## Fix
When serializing `<pre>` content to Markdown, choose a fence length longer than any backtick run present in the code block content, with a minimum length of 3.
Are you affected?
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Affected packages
References
- https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/security/advisories/GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3 [WEB]
- https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/commit/f35f8f723c713bd8f912d86e9ec6881275ff5af9 [WEB]
- https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml [PACKAGE]
- https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/releases/tag/v1.13.0 [WEB]