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GHSA-9jh8-v38h-cvhr

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

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) Moderate CVE-2026-63430

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
crates.io ammonia < 3.3.2 3.3.2
crates.io ammonia >= 4.0.0, < 4.0.2 4.0.2
crates.io ammonia >= 4.1.0, < 4.1.3 4.1.3

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.