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GHSA-h5vq-qfcg-4m6p

Symfony's HtmlSanitizer URL Attributes Pass Through BiDi Override Characters → Visual href Spoofing

Details

### Description

`Symfony\Component\HtmlSanitizer\TextSanitizer\UrlSanitizer::parse()` (used by `UrlSanitizer::sanitize()` and therefore by every `HtmlSanitizer` config that allows links or media) accepts URLs that contain Unicode explicit-direction BiDi formatting characters: U+202A–U+202E (LRE / RLE / PDF / LRO / RLO) and U+2066–U+2069 (LRI / RLI / FSI / PDI). These characters are passed through unchanged into the `href` / `src` attributes produced by `HtmlSanitizer`. When the resulting HTML is rendered in a browser, the override characters reverse or alter the visual ordering of the URL text, so the displayed link can differ arbitrarily from the actual destination: a classic visual-spoofing / phishing primitive against viewers of sanitized content.

### Resolution

`UrlSanitizer::parse()` now rejects URLs containing the explicit-direction BiDi formatting code points (U+202A–U+202E, U+2066–U+2069) before invoking the underlying URL parser. As an unrelated companion fix in the same patch, spaces inside path/query/fragment are now percent-encoded rather than rejected outright, while spaces in the scheme/authority remain rejected by the post-encoding whitespace check.

The patch for this issue is available [here](https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/743a435e948b897ef2b5564ac438d4beb95d2526) for branch 5.4.

### Credits

Symfony would like to thank Himanshu Anand for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for providing the fix.

Are you affected?

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Affected packages

Packagist / symfony/html-sanitizer
Introduced in: 6.1.0 Fixed in: 6.4.40
Fix composer require symfony/html-sanitizer:^6.4.40
Packagist / symfony/html-sanitizer
Introduced in: 7.0.0 Fixed in: 7.4.12
Fix composer require symfony/html-sanitizer:^7.4.12
Packagist / symfony/html-sanitizer
Introduced in: 8.0.0 Fixed in: 8.0.12
Fix composer require symfony/html-sanitizer:^8.0.12
Packagist / symfony/symfony
Introduced in: 6.1.0 Fixed in: 6.4.40
Fix composer require symfony/symfony:^6.4.40
Packagist / symfony/symfony
Introduced in: 7.0.0 Fixed in: 7.4.12
Fix composer require symfony/symfony:^7.4.12
Packagist / symfony/symfony
Introduced in: 8.0.0 Fixed in: 8.0.12
Fix composer require symfony/symfony:^8.0.12

References