Security

🔒 Security

Sanitization, XSS protection, and security best practices for Neiki's Editor.

---

⚠️ Why Sanitization Matters

Neiki's Editor is a rich text editor — users can paste content from any source, including web pages, documents, and potentially malicious sites. Without proper sanitization:

• XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) — injected <script> tags can steal cookies, hijack sessions, or deface pages
• Event handler injection — onclick="maliciousCode()" on any element
• Protocol injection — href="javascript:..." in links

Always sanitize HTML on the server before saving to a database or rendering to other users.

---

🛡️ Built-in Client-Side Sanitization

Neiki's Editor sanitizes all HTML that enters the editor — from autosave restoration, textarea content, setContent(), and insertHTML(). The built-in sanitizer:

• Strips dangerous tags: <script>, <iframe>, <object>, <embed>, <form>, etc.
• Removes event handler attributes: onclick, onerror, onload, onmouseover, etc.
• Removes javascript: and data: protocol URLs in href and src attributes
• Uses a safe entity-decoding approach (regex-based, not innerHTML-based) to prevent entity-encoding bypass attacks

Important

Client-side sanitization is a defense-in-depth measure. It does not replace server-side sanitization. Always validate and sanitize on the server.

---

🐘 Server-Side Sanitization — PHP Helper

The included PHP helper provides a sanitize() method:

require_once 'path/to/php/neiki-editor.php';

// Sanitize before saving to database
$cleanHTML = NeikiEditor::sanitize($_POST['content']);

$stmt = $pdo->prepare('UPDATE articles SET body = ? WHERE id = ?');
$stmt->execute([$cleanHTML, $articleId]);

The PHP sanitizer strips:

• Dangerous tags (<script>, <iframe>, <object>, <embed>, <form>, <input>, etc.)
• Event handler attributes (onclick, onerror, onload, onfocus, onblur, etc.)
• javascript: and data:text/html protocol URLs

---

✅ Safe Tags Allowlist

The built-in sanitizer allows these HTML elements (content generated by the editor):

Category	Tags
Structure	p, div, span, br, hr
Headings	h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
Formatting	strong, b, em, i, u, s, sub, sup, mark, code, pre
Lists	ul, ol, li
Links	a (with href, target, rel)
Media	img (with src, alt, width, height), video, source
Tables	table, thead, tbody, tr, td, th (with colspan, rowspan)
Quotes	blockquote

Note

For production use with strict requirements, consider using a dedicated server-side HTML sanitization library such as HTML Purifier (PHP), DOMPurify (JS), or Bleach (Python).

---

🔐 Content Security Policy (CSP)

If your application uses a Content Security Policy, ensure the following are allowed for the editor to function:

Content-Security-Policy:
    script-src 'self' https://cdn.neikiri.dev https://cdn.jsdelivr.net;
    style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://cdn.neikiri.dev;
    img-src 'self' data: blob: *;

Caution

'unsafe-inline' for style-src is required because the editor applies inline styles for font sizes, colors, and image dimensions. If your CSP disallows this, some formatting features will not work.

---

🔑 Autosave Security

Autosave stores content in localStorage. Be aware:

• Content in localStorage is not encrypted
• It is accessible to any JavaScript on the same origin
• For sensitive content, disable autosave and use server-side saving instead

new NeikiEditor('#editor', {
    // Don't use autosave for sensitive forms
    // Use onSave/onChange to send to your encrypted backend
    onSave: async function(content) {
        await fetch('/api/save', {
            method: 'POST',
            headers: {
                'Content-Type': 'application/json',
                'X-CSRF-Token': getCsrfToken()
            },
            body: JSON.stringify({ content })
        });
    }
});

---

🛡️ XSS Prevention Changelog

Notable security fixes in Neiki's Editor:

Version	Fix
3.0.1	Fixed polynomial regex risk in HTML code view — replaced with deterministic linear scan
2.10.1	Fixed XSS vulnerability in sanitizer's entity decoding — replaced innerHTML-based decoding with safe regex approach
2.9.3	Hardened autosave HTML sanitization; fixed unsafe modal value interpolation for link/image dialogs; guarded against prototype pollution (__proto__, constructor)
2.9.4	Reworked autosave storage key normalization to avoid polynomial regex on uncontrolled input; updated HTML sanitization parsing to avoid DOMParser.parseFromString

---

📋 Security Checklist

✅	Server-side sanitization before saving to database
✅	CSRF tokens on all form submissions
✅	imageUploadHandler validates file types server-side
✅	Content retrieved via getContent() sanitized before display to other users
✅	Autosave disabled for sensitive content
✅	CSP headers configured appropriately
✅	Using latest editor version (check Changelog)

---

🔗 Related Pages

🔗 Integration Guide	PHP sanitization helper usage
🧩 Advanced Features	Autosave configuration
📋 Changelog	Security fix history

---

_{← Back to Home}