GHSA-9jh8-v38h-cvhr
ammonia: mXSS via MathML `annotation-xml` encoding strip
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
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
### Impact
Low: Requires both MathML and at least one raw-text HTML tag to be enabled, and most websites don't enable either of those.
### Patches
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/245 (released in 4.1.3)
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/244 (released in 4.0.2)
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/243 (released in 3.3.2)
### Workarounds
Call <code>builder.[add_clean_content_tags](https://docs.rs/ammonia/latest/ammonia/struct.Builder.html#method.add_clean_content_tags)("annotation-xml")</code> to remove the annotation-xml element and all of its children, including the XSS gadget.
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/security/advisories/GHSA-9jh8-v38h-cvhr
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-63430
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/243
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/244
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/pull/245
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/commit/004bf2cee4288f74a6ee619d589e3e90c24c09ca
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/commit/7ac3fd3145236f28857eeecbadb544c8659cba31
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/commit/b51bf4f9749ed3cd518330105f20a2c39c9ee274
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/releases/tag/v3.3.2
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/releases/tag/v4.0.2
- https://github.com/rust-ammonia/ammonia/releases/tag/v4.1.3
- https://ivan09999.github.io/ammonia-mxss
- https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2026-0193.html