highVulnerability

GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3

## Summary `to_markdown()` is vulnerable when serializing attacker-controlled `<pre>` content. The `<pre>` handler emits a fixed three-backtick fenced code block, but writes decoded text content into that fence without choosing a delimiter longer than any backtick run inside the content. An attacker can place backticks and HTML-like text inside a sanitized `<pre>` element so that the generated Markdown closes the fence early and leaves raw HTML outside the code block. When that Markdown is rendered by a CommonMark/GFM-style renderer that allows raw HTML, the HTML executes. This is a bypass of the v1.12.0 Markdown hardening. That fix escaped HTML-significant characters for regular text nodes, but `<pre>` uses a separate serialization path and does not apply the same protection. ## Details The vulnerable `<pre>` Markdown path: - extracts decoded text from the `<pre>` subtree - opens a fenced block with a fixed delimiter of `````` - writes the decoded text directly into the output - closes with another fixed `````` Because the fence length is fixed, attacker-controlled content containing a backtick run of length 3 or more can terminate the code block. If the content also contains decoded HTML-like text such as `&lt;img ...&gt;`, that text appears outside the fence in the resulting Markdown and is treated as raw HTML by downstream Markdown renderers. The issue is not that HTML-like text appears inside code blocks. The issue is that the serializer allows attacker-controlled `<pre>` text to break out of the fixed fence. ## Reproduction ```python from justhtml import JustHTML payload = "<pre>&#96;&#96;&#96;\n&lt;img src=x onerror=alert(1)&gt;</pre>" doc = JustHTML(payload, fragment=True) # default sanitize=True print(doc.to_html(pretty=False)) # <pre>``` # &lt;img src=x onerror=alert(1)&gt;</pre> print(doc.to_markdown()) # ``` # ``` # <img src=x onerror=alert(1)> # ``` ``` Rendered as CommonMark/GFM-style Markdown, that output is interpreted as: 1. Line 1

Properties

ghsa_id
GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3
severity
high
summary
JustHTML is vulnerable to XSS via code fence breakout in <pre> content
cve_id
GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3
is_ghsa_only
true
ghsa_published
2026-03-24T19:22:21Z
source_url
https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-5vp3-3cg6-2rq3
ghsa_updated
2026-03-24T19:22:21Z

Related Entities (4)

AFFECTS (1)

[Software]pip/justhtml

HAS_WEAKNESS (2)

[Weakness]Improper Neutralization of Script-Related HTML Tags in a Web Page (Basic XSS)
[Weakness]Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

REPORTED_BY (1)

[Source]GitHub Advisory Database

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