CVE-2022-39353criticalCWE-1288CWE-20

CVE-2022-39353: critical vulnerability in xmldom

xmldom allows multiple root nodes in a DOM

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28Vexday Risk Score

No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.

ssvc Trackcvss 9.4epss 1.6%
In short

The xmldom library incorrectly parses malformed XML with multiple root elements instead of rejecting it, allowing all roots to be added to the document tree. This violates XML standards and can lead to security issues in applications that rely on a single root node.

Technical detail

xmldom's DOMParser accepts non-well-formed XML containing multiple top-level elements and adds them all to the Document's childNodes collection without error reporting. This violates W3C XML DOM Level 2 Core specification and breaks assumptions about single-root tree structure, creating potential attack surface for DOM traversal exploits in dependent applications.

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
xmldom is a pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) `DOMParser` and `XMLSerializer` module. xmldom parses XML that is not well-formed because it contains multiple top level elements, and adds all root nodes to the `childNodes` collection of the `Document`, without reporting any error or throwing. This breaks the assumption that there is only a single root node in the tree, which led to issuance of CVE-2022-39299 as it is a potential issue for dependents. Update to @xmldom/xmldom@~0.7.7, @xmldom/xmldom@~0.8.4 (dist-tag latest) or @xmldom/xmldom@>=0.9.0-beta.4 (dist-tag next). As a workaround, please one of the following approaches depending on your use case: instead of searching for elements in the whole DOM, only search in the `documentElement`or reject a document with a document that has more then 1 `childNode`.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:H
Affected products
xmldom · xmldom
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