Our Content Policy

by admin_lifexite 2 2 7 years, 2 months ago

I’m looking for best practices for performing strict (whitelist) validation/filtering of user-submitted HTML.

Main purpose is to filter out XSS and similar nasties that may be entered via web forms. Secondary purpose is to limit breakage of HTML content entered by non-technical users e.g. via WYSIWYG editor that has an HTML view.

I’m considering using HTML Purifier, or rolling my own by using an HTML DOM parser to go through a process like HTML(dirty)->DOM(dirty)->filter->DOM(clean)->HTML(clean).

Can you describe successes with these or any easier strategies that are also effective? Any pitfalls to watch out for?

2 ANSWERS

February 16, 2017 at 10:21 am admin_lifexite

I used HTML Purifier with success and haven’t had any xss or other unwanted input filter through. I also run the sanitize HTML through the Tidy extension to make sure it validates as well.

February 16, 2017 at 10:22 am admin_lifexite

I’ve tested all exploits I know on HTML Purifier and it did very well. It filters not only HTML, but also CSS and URLs.

Once you narrow elements and attributes to innocent ones, the pitfalls are in attribute content – javascript: pseudo-URLs (IE allows tab characters in protocol name – java script: still works) and CSS properties that trigger JS.

Parsing of URLs may be tricky, e.g. these are valid: http://spoof.com:xxx@evil.com or //evil.com. Internationalized domains (IDN) can be written in two ways – Unicode and punycode.

Go with HTML Purifier – it has most of these worked out. If you just want to fix broken HTML, then use HTML Tidy (it’s available as PHP extension).

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