Layui has DOM Clobbering gadgets that leads to Cross-site Scripting

Summary

A DOM Clobbering vulnerability has been discovered in layui that can lead to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) on web pages where attacker-controlled HTML elements (e.g., img tags with unsanitized name attributes) are present.

It's worth noting that we’ve identifed similar issues in other popular client-side libraries like Webpack (CVE-2024-43788) and Vite (CVE-2024-45812), which might serve as valuable references.

Backgrounds

DOM Clobbering is a type of code-reuse attack where the attacker first embeds a piece of non-script, seemingly benign HTML markups in the webpage (e.g. through a post or comment) and leverages the gadgets (pieces of js code snippet) living in the existing libraries to transform it into executable code.

Impact

This vulnerability can lead to cross-site scripting (XSS) on websites that uses layui library and allow users to inject certain scriptless HTML tags with improperly sanitized name or id attributes.

Patch

This problem has been patched in Layui 2.9.17. You can find the official fix announcement at: https://layui.dev/notes/share/security-currentscript.html