Astro: Reflected XSS via unescaped View Transition animation properties

Summary

Astro's server-side View Transition CSS generator interpolates animation properties into an inline <style> element without escaping them for the CSS and HTML contexts.

An attacker-controlled value passed to an animation property such as duration can contain a </style> sequence, terminate the generated style element, and inject arbitrary HTML or JavaScript.

This is similar to GHSA-8hv8-536x-4wqp, but exploits a different injection point: unescaped View Transition animation values in a server-generated <style> element rather than an unescaped slot name in a hydration template.

Like GHSA-8hv8-536x-4wqp, exploitation requires an application to pass attacker-controlled data to an Astro API. However, the value is subsequently inserted into the HTML response without context-appropriate escaping by Astro.

Details

packages/astro/src/runtime/server/transition.ts

The generated stylesheet is wrapped in a <style> element and marked as HTML-safe:

const css = sheet.toString();
result._metadata.extraHead.push(markHTMLString(`<style>${css}</style>`));

Animation properties are added to the stylesheet without escaping:

if (anim.duration) {
  addAnimationProperty(builder, 'animation-duration', toTimeValue(anim.duration));
}

For string values, toTimeValue() returns the input unchanged:

export function toTimeValue(num: number | string) {
  return typeof num === 'number' ? num + 'ms' : num;
}

As a result, a duration value containing </style> can escape from the generated style element.

Other TransitionAnimation properties, including easing, direction, delay, fillMode, and name, are serialized by the same animation builder. The following PoC only relies on the official fade() helper and its duration option.

PoC

Using:

• [email protected]
• @astrojs/[email protected]

astro.config.mjs

import node from '@astrojs/node';
import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';

export default defineConfig({
  output: 'server',
  adapter: node({ mode: 'standalone' }),
});

<img width="1307" height="681" alt="image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0834236d-008f-415f-9f23-db509ab6f8f6" />