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Avoid usage of html_safe #305

Merged
merged 4 commits into from
May 11, 2018
Merged

Avoid usage of html_safe #305

merged 4 commits into from
May 11, 2018

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tijmenb
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@tijmenb tijmenb commented May 11, 2018

This is a follow up to an incident last month where we found a XSS vulnerability caused by html_safe being called on untrusted user input (see alphagov/finder-frontend#480 and follow ups).

To avoid recurrence, this PR makes sure that 1) we're never calling html_safe so that everything is escaped by default, 2) we can't use it anymore. This makes escaping and calling html_safe the exclusive responsibility of the application.

See the individual commits for details.

@tijmenb tijmenb temporarily deployed to govuk-publishing-compon-pr-305 May 11, 2018 06:46 Inactive
it "doesn't use `html_safe`" do
files_with_html_safe = `grep -rni "html_safe" app/views/govuk_publishing_components/components`.lines

expect(files_with_html_safe).to be_empty
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🙏

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@sihugh sihugh left a comment

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It needs a rebase to resolve the conflict in CHANGELOG.md. If you're doing that, could you fix the link to http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/OutputSafetyHelper.html in the commit message for the to_sentence view helper? It's wrapped over two lines and confused me for a second when I followed it and it didn't work.

Looks great otherwise 👍

The `to_sentence` helper knows about safe and unsafe HTML and will
escape the unsafe input and not safe input like `hidden_links`.

See:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/OutputSafetyHelper.html#method-i-to_sentence
This means the application will have to call `html_safe` on the thing
itself. This seems to only be used by the `frontend` application.
Now that we've removed all `html_safe` from the components we can add a
test to make sure we don't add it back.
@tijmenb tijmenb merged commit 76c2aa7 into master May 11, 2018
@tijmenb tijmenb deleted the no-html-safe branch May 11, 2018 10:10
@andysellick andysellick mentioned this pull request May 15, 2018
NickColley added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2018
To see what led to this decision see:

- [an incident involving multiple components](#305)
- [a potential vulnerability with the govspeak component](#356).
NickColley added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2018
To see what led to this decision see:

- [an incident involving multiple components](#305)
- [a potential vulnerability with the govspeak component](#356).
NickColley added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2018
To see what led to this decision see:

- [an incident involving multiple components](#305)
- [a potential vulnerability with the govspeak component](#356).
NickColley added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2018
To see what led to this decision see:

- [an incident involving multiple components](#305)
- [a potential vulnerability with the govspeak component](#356).
NickColley added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2018
To see what led to this decision see:

- [an incident involving multiple components](#305)
- [a potential vulnerability with the govspeak component](#356).
NickColley added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 1, 2018
To see what led to this decision see:

- [an incident involving multiple components](#305)
- [a potential vulnerability with the govspeak component](#356).
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3 participants