Fix XSS via unsafe rendering of untrusted external data in templates (#5826)

Remove |safe filter from 6 template locations where data from external
search engine APIs was rendered as raw HTML without sanitization. Jinja2
autoescape now properly escapes these fields.

The |safe filter was originally added in commit 213041adc (March 2021)
by copying the pattern from result.title|safe and result.content|safe.
However, title and content are pre-escaped via escape() in webapp.py
lines 704-706 before highlight_content() adds trusted <span> tags for
search term highlighting. The metadata, info.value, link.url_label,
repository, and filename fields never go through any escaping and flow
directly from external API responses to the template.

Affected templates and their untrusted data sources:
- macros.html: result.metadata from DuckDuckGo, Reuters, Presearch,
  Podcast Index, Fyyd, bpb, moviepilot, mediawiki, and others
- paper.html: result.metadata from academic search engines
- map.html: info.value and link.url_label from OpenStreetMap
  user-contributed extratags
- code.html: result.repository and result.filename from GitHub API

Example exploit: a search engine API returning
metadata='<img src=x onerror=alert(document.cookie)>' would execute
arbitrary JavaScript in every user's browser viewing that result.
This commit is contained in:
Renaud Allard
2026-03-13 13:28:31 +01:00
committed by GitHub
parent 867a43ac1f
commit 23fb76f08f
4 changed files with 6 additions and 6 deletions

View File

@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
{%- if result.repository -%}
<p class="content">{{- '' -}}
{{ _('Repository') }}: {{- ' ' -}}
<a href="{{ result.repository|safe }}"{{- ' ' -}}
<a href="{{ result.repository }}"{{- ' ' -}}
{% if results_on_new_tab %}
target="_blank" {{- ' ' -}}
rel="noopener noreferrer"
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
{%- if result.filename %}
<p class="content">
{{ _('Filename') }}: {{ result.filename|safe }}
{{ _('Filename') }}: {{ result.filename }}
</p>
{% endif -%}