Affected versions
Symfony versions >=2.2.0, <2.36.0, >=3.0.0, <3.1.0 of the Symfony UX Autocomplete component are affected by this security issue.
The issue has been fixed in Symfony 2.36.0, 3.1.0.
Description
The Stimulus controller shipped with symfony/ux-autocomplete renders AJAX
response items into the dropdown by interpolating the text field directly
into HTML template literals (<div>${item[labelField]}</div>) inside
_createAutocompleteWithRemoteData(). The value is parsed as HTML rather than
text, so any markup contained in the AJAX response is executed by the browser.
When the dropdown values are derived from user-supplied content, an attacker can craft a string that triggers stored XSS in the browser of any other user who later opens a page containing an autocomplete widget backed by the same data.
Resolution
The option and item renderers used in
_createAutocompleteWithRemoteData() now use TomSelect's escape helper to
HTML-escape the value by default. Endpoints that legitimately return HTML (for
example, to highlight the search term) can opt back in to the previous behavior
by setting options_as_html: true. The AutocompleteChoiceTypeExtension
normalizer that previously forced options_as_html=false when
autocomplete_url was set has been dropped so the opt-in is reachable from
the form layer.
The patch for this issue is available here for branch 2.x (and forward-ported to 3.x).
Credits
We would like to thank Alex Ashkov for reporting the issue and Hugo Alliaume for providing the fix.