VDB
KO

RUSTSEC-2026-0193

mXSS in ammonia via MathML `annotation-xml` encoding strip

Details

If a certain set of MathML tags are enabled, an attacker can inject arbitrary JavaScript code into the user's browser.

The `annotation-xml` tag has slightly different behavior than the other "integration point" tags in MathML and SVG, but ammonia didn't handle it, so it didn't correctly strip the namespace-incompatible tags.

This vulnerability only has an effect when the `math` and `annotation-xml` tags are both enabled, but the `encoding` attribute is disabled, because it relies on the following sequence of steps:

1. User writes code like `<math><annotation-xml encoding="text/html"><gadget></annotation-xml></math>`. 2. Namespace filtering checks the DOM, and it passes. `<gadget>` is parsed as HTML. 3. Attribute filter strips it down to `<math><annotation-xml><gadget></annotation-xml></math>`. Because the encoding attribute is gone, `<gadget>` is now parsed as MathML. 4. The gadget is written in such a way that it exploits the parsing differences between HTML and MathML.

Additionally, the gadget can only be written using 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.

[elements]: https://github.com/servo/html5ever/blob/045a0378f2b0f8d4a350793899cf722a2a9b3d11/html5ever/src/tree_builder/rules.rs

---

**Discovered by:** ivan0912 (YesWeHack) · **Date:** 2026-06-29 · Found via local differential analysis and source review of ammonia's sanitisation pipeline; no third-party systems were tested.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

crates.io / ammonia
Introduced in: 0.0.0-0 Fixed in: 3.3.2

Upgrade ammonia to 3.3.2 or newer (ecosystem crates.io).

References