Description

ApostropheCMS: Mutation-XSS / allowedTags bypass via literal </textarea/> solidus close

Summary

A mutation-XSS / allowedTags bypass: when textarea (or xmp) is included in allowedTags, an input containing a literal </textarea/> (a solidus right after the RCDATA end-tag name) lets non-allowed markup such as <img src=x onerror=…> pass through sanitizeHtml() live and unescaped, even though img/onerror are not in the allowlist. A spec-compliant browser executes the surviving handler — XSS. This is a literal-solidus variant that bypasses the two most recent fixes in this code area (CVE-2026-40186, CVE-2026-44990), both already applied in 2.17.5. The default configuration is not affected.

Details

sanitize-html emits the text content of HTML raw-text elements (textarea, xmp) without escaping. Two things combine:

Parser differential: on input, htmlparser2 does NOT recognize </textarea/> (solidus after the RCDATA end-tag name) as a close tag; it emits </textarea/><img …> as a single raw-text node.

Unescaped passthrough: the ontext handler (index.js ~575-583) appends textarea/xmp content with result += text (no escapeHtml), assuming it is "already properly encoded" — true for entity-decoded content (what CVE-2026-40186 fixed) but false for this mis-tokenized literal close tag. A spec browser treats </textarea/> as a valid textarea close, so the following <img onerror> is parsed as a live element. The recent fixes addressed entity-encoding (CVE-2026-40186) and the xmp default (CVE-2026-44990); neither covers the literal-solidus mis-tokenization, so the raw passthrough still leaks.

PoC

// npm i sanitize-html@2.17.5 parse5 && node poc.js
const sanitizeHtml = require('sanitize-html');
const input = '<textarea></textarea/><img src=x onerror="alert(document.domain)">';
const opts  = { allowedTags: sanitizeHtml.defaults.allowedTags.concat(['textarea']) };  // img NOT allowed
console.log(sanitizeHtml(input, opts));
// => <textarea></textarea/><img src=x onerror="alert(document.domain)"></textarea>
//    the <img onerror> survives live and unescaped
...
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Re-parsing the sanitized OUTPUT with parse5 (the WHATWG HTML parser browsers/jsdom use) yields a live <img src=x onerror=alert(document.domain)> at body level (it escaped the textarea RCDATA, not inert text) → the onerror fires in a browser. Confirmed on 2.17.5 (Node v24). A canonical poc.js is attached.

Impact

Cross-site scripting (CWE-79). Requires textarea (or xmp) in allowedTags — a benign-looking, common addition in form builders, CMS, and rich-text editors. Adding a harmless tag that then enables XSS via non-allowed img/onerror breaks the sanitizer's core contract; the maintainers have fixed this class before (e.g. GHSA-9mrh). An attacker who can submit content rendered through such a configuration achieves stored/reflected XSS (cookie theft, session hijack). Severity Medium (default config is safe; user interaction to view the page). Suggested fix: route textarea/xmp content through escapeHtml instead of the raw passthrough, and/or fix the htmlparser2 </tag/> RCDATA end-tag tokenization to match the WHATWG spec.

Mitigation

Aliases

References