GHSA-h5vq-qfcg-4m6p
Symfony's HtmlSanitizer URL Attributes Pass Through BiDi Override Characters → Visual href Spoofing
At a glance
- Published
- Updated
- CVE
- CVE-2026-45064
- CVSS_V4
- CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Description
### Description `Symfony\Component\HtmlSanitizer\TextSanitizer\UrlSanitizer::parse()` (used by `UrlSanitizer::sanitize()` and therefore by every `HtmlSanitizer` config that allows links or media) accepts URLs that contain Unicode explicit-direction BiDi formatting characters: U+202A–U+202E (LRE / RLE / PDF / LRO / RLO) and U+2066–U+2069 (LRI / RLI / FSI / PDI). These characters are passed through unchanged into the `href` / `src` attributes produced by `HtmlSanitizer`. When the resulting HTML is rendered in a browser, the override characters reverse or alter the visual ordering of the URL text, so the displayed link can differ arbitrarily from the actual destination: a classic visual-spoofing / phishing primitive against viewers of sanitized content. ### Resolution `UrlSanitizer::parse()` now rejects URLs containing the explicit-direction BiDi formatting code points (U+202A–U+202E, U+2066–U+2069) before invoking the underlying URL parser. As an unrelated companion fix in the same patch, spaces inside path/query/fragment are now percent-encoded rather than rejected outright, while spaces in the scheme/authority remain rejected by the post-encoding whitespace check. The patch for this issue is available [here](https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/743a435e948b897ef2b5564ac438d4beb95d2526) for branch 5.4. ### Credits Symfony would like to thank Himanshu Anand for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for providing the fix.
Affected packages
| Package | Versions |
|---|---|
| Packagist · symfony/html-sanitizer | introduced 6.1.0, fixed 6.4.40 |
| Packagist · symfony/html-sanitizer | introduced 7.0.0, fixed 7.4.12 |
| Packagist · symfony/html-sanitizer | introduced 8.0.0, fixed 8.0.12 |
| Packagist · symfony/symfony | introduced 6.1.0, fixed 6.4.40 |
| Packagist · symfony/symfony | introduced 7.0.0, fixed 7.4.12 |
| Packagist · symfony/symfony | introduced 8.0.0, fixed 8.0.12 |
References
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony/security/advisories/GHSA-h5vq-qfcg-4m6p WEB
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/743a435e948b897ef2b5564ac438d4beb95d2526 WEB
- https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/symfony/html-sanitizer/CVE-2026-45064.yaml WEB
- https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/symfony/symfony/CVE-2026-45064.yaml WEB
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony PACKAGE
- https://symfony.com/cve-2026-45064 WEB
Sources
| Source | Licence |
|---|---|
| OSV.dev | CC-BY 4.0 — GitHub Advisory Database |