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@renovate renovate bot commented Mar 12, 2023

This PR contains the following updates:

Package Change Age Confidence
org.jsoup:jsoup (source) 1.14.31.15.3 age confidence

GitHub Vulnerability Alerts

CVE-2022-36033

jsoup may incorrectly sanitize HTML including javascript: URL expressions, which could allow cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks when a reader subsequently clicks that link. If the non-default SafeList.preserveRelativeLinks option is enabled, HTML including javascript: URLs that have been crafted with control characters will not be sanitized. If the site that this HTML is published on does not set a Content Security Policy, an XSS attack is then possible.

Impact

Sites that accept input HTML from users and use jsoup to sanitize that HTML, may be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, if they have enabled SafeList.preserveRelativeLinks and do not set an appropriate Content Security Policy.

Patches

This issue is patched in jsoup 1.15.3.

Users should upgrade to this version. Additionally, as the unsanitized input may have been persisted, old content should be cleaned again using the updated version.

Workarounds

To remediate this issue without immediately upgrading:

  • disable SafeList.preserveRelativeLinks, which will rewrite input URLs as absolute URLs
  • ensure an appropriate Content Security Policy is defined. (This should be used regardless of upgrading, as a defence-in-depth best practice.)

Background and root cause

jsoup includes a Cleaner component, which is designed to sanitize input HTML against configurable safe-lists of acceptable tags, attributes, and attribute values.

This includes removing potentially malicious attributes such as <a href="javascript:...">, which may enable XSS attacks. It does this by validating URL attributes against allowed URL protocols (e.g. http, https).

However, an attacker may be able to bypass this check by embedding control characters into the href attribute value. This causes the Java URL class, which is used to resolve relative URLs to absolute URLs before checking the URL's protocol, to treat the URL as a relative URL. It is then resolved into an absolute URL with the configured base URI.

For example, java\tscript:... would resolve to https://example.com/java\tscript:....

By default, when using a safe-list that allows a tags, jsoup will rewrite any relative URLs (e.g. /foo/) to an absolute URL (e.g. https://example.com/foo/). Therefore, this attack attempt would be successfully mitigated. However, if the option SafeList.preserveRelativeLinks is enabled (which does not rewrite relative links to absolute), the input is left as-is.

While Java will treat a path like java\tscript: as a relative path, as it does not match the allowed characters of a URL spec, browsers may normalize out the control characters, and subsequently evaluate it as a javascript: spec inline expression. That disparity then leads to an XSS opportunity.

Sites defining a Content Security Policy that does not allow javascript expressions in link URLs will not be impacted, as the policy will prevent the script's execution.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

Credits

Thanks to Jens Häderer, who reported this issue, and contributed to its resolution.


Configuration

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@renovate renovate bot requested a review from a team as a code owner March 12, 2023 17:58
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from 7ecd701 to b7f5cf2 Compare April 17, 2023 13:06
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codecov bot commented Apr 17, 2023

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 56.05%. Comparing base (0de0791) to head (445accf).
Report is 8 commits behind head on master.

❗ Current head 445accf differs from pull request most recent head c5cea49. Consider uploading reports for the commit c5cea49 to get more accurate results

Additional details and impacted files
@@             Coverage Diff              @@
##             master      #37      +/-   ##
============================================
+ Coverage     55.69%   56.05%   +0.36%     
- Complexity      282      288       +6     
============================================
  Files            93       95       +2     
  Lines          1273     1279       +6     
  Branches         66       66              
============================================
+ Hits            709      717       +8     
+ Misses          511      509       -2     
  Partials         53       53              

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@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch 2 times, most recently from 75f446c to ef1ef97 Compare September 22, 2023 13:34
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from ef1ef97 to 4a606f1 Compare October 10, 2023 16:14
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from 4a606f1 to 445accf Compare February 27, 2024 10:22
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@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from c5cea49 to 02da011 Compare June 5, 2025 15:05
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from 02da011 to 70e2594 Compare August 11, 2025 13:36
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from 70e2594 to 7f7a6d7 Compare September 3, 2025 11:53
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/maven-org.jsoup-jsoup-vulnerability branch from 7f7a6d7 to a54134c Compare January 20, 2026 11:02
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