Skip to content

fix: Preserve XML structural entities during decode#7838

Merged
camdecoster merged 4 commits into
masterfrom
cam/avoid-decoding-unsafe-characters-tosvg
Jun 16, 2026
Merged

fix: Preserve XML structural entities during decode#7838
camdecoster merged 4 commits into
masterfrom
cam/avoid-decoding-unsafe-characters-tosvg

Conversation

@camdecoster

@camdecoster camdecoster commented Jun 11, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Description

Preserve XML structural entities during decode when exporting SVG.

Changes

  • Update htmlEntityDecode to preserve the five XML structural entities (&, ", ', <, >) in named, decimal, and hex numeric forms instead of decoding them
  • Add tests to check if entities are preserved decoding

Testing

  • Be on master
  • Open Plotly devtools
  • In browser devtools, enter the following in the console:
    const fig = {
      data: [{ x: [1], y: [1], type: "scatter" }],
      layout: {
        annotations: [
          {
            x: 1,
            y: 1,
            showarrow: false,
            text: '<span style="x:&#34; onmouseover=&#34;alert(1)&#34; a=&#34;">Zoidberg</span>',
          },
        ],
      },
    };
    
    Plotly.newPlot(gd, fig)
      .then(() =>
        Plotly.toImage(gd, {
          format: "svg",
          imageDataOnly: true,
        }),
      )
      .then((svg) => console.log(decodeURIComponent(svg)));
  • Toward the end of the log statement, note that onmouseover has been injected into the SVG as an attribute
  • Switch to this branch
  • Go through the same process
  • Toward the end of the log statement, note that onmouseover is only part of the style attribute

Notes

  • Attack path. htmlEntityDecode in tosvg.js ran after XMLSerializer.serializeToString and decoded &quot; / &#34; / &#x22; back to literal " chars in attribute values the serializer had safely escaped, letting the payload break out of style="..." and inject arbitrary attributes (onmouseover=, onclick=, …).
  • Affected callers. Plotly.toImage, Plotly.downloadImage, and downstream products that embed user-authored figure SVG into a privileged origin (shared-plot previews, dashboards, exported-image galleries).
  • Non-browser SVG renderers. htmlEntityDecode exists partly so exported SVG renders correctly in Batik / Illustrator / kaleido (for PDF/EPS). The fix preserves five more entities in the output; SVG is still valid XML.
  • References:

@camdecoster camdecoster marked this pull request as ready for review June 11, 2026 21:45
emilykl
emilykl previously approved these changes Jun 15, 2026

@emilykl emilykl left a comment

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Looks good to me, thanks @camdecoster 🚀 Can you add a draftlog?

@camdecoster camdecoster merged commit 1a7dcfd into master Jun 16, 2026
83 of 84 checks passed
@camdecoster camdecoster deleted the cam/avoid-decoding-unsafe-characters-tosvg branch June 16, 2026 20:26
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants