Google, Mozilla, and Cure53 engineers have collaborated to create an application programming interface (API) that offers a comprehensive solution to HTML sanitization. The API will be used in upcoming versions of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers.
HTML sanitization is the process of reviewing an HTML document and creating a new HTML document that only contains the "secure" and desired tags. By sanitizing any HTML code submitted by a user, HTML sanitization can be used to defend against attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS).
Sanitation is usually carried out using either a whitelist or a blacklist strategy. Sanitization can be done further using rules that define which operations should be performed on the subject tags.
When rendering user-generated content or working with templates, web applications are often expected to manage dynamic HTML content in the browser. Client-side HTML processing often introduces security flaws, which malicious actors exploit to stage XSS attacks, steal user data, or execute web commands on their behalf.
“Historically, the web has been confronted with XSS issues ever since the inception of JavaScript,” Frederik Braun, security engineer at Mozilla, said. “The web has an increase in browser capabilities with new APIs and can thus be added to the attacker’s toolbox.”
To protect against XSS attacks, many developers use open-source JavaScript libraries like DOMPurify. DOMPurify takes an HTML string as input and sanitizes it by deleting potentially vulnerable parts and escaping them.
“The issue with parsing HTML is that it is a living standard and thus a quickly moving target,” Braun said. “To ensure that the HTML sanitizer works correctly on new input, it needs to keep up with this standard. The failure to do so can be catastrophic and lead to sanitizer bypasses.”
The HTML Sanitizer API incorporates XSS security directly into the browser. The API's sanitizer class can be instantiated and used without the need to import external libraries.
“This moves the responsibility for correct parsing into a piece of software that is already getting frequent security updates and has proven successful in doing it timely,” Braun said. According to Bentkowski, browsers already have built-in sanitizers for clipboard info, so repurposing the code to extend native sanitization capabilities makes perfect sense.
