unstructured: Stored XSS via unescaped HTML generation

[ Why it matters ]Priority signals

• Public proof-of-concept exploit exists (CISA SSVC)

[ Description ]Official description

The unstructured library provides open-source components for ingesting and pre-processing images and text documents, such as PDFs, HTML, Word docs, and many more. Prior to 0.24.1, partition_html(html_parser_version="v2") and the VLM partitioner can preserve untrusted document tags, attributes, text, and link targets in metadata.text_as_html, while elements_to_html() emits the result as an HTML document. The to_html() path in unstructured/documents/ontology.py does not escape output or reject unsafe URL schemes, allowing event-handler attributes, attribute breakout markup, and javascript: links to survive parsing. When the generated HTML or text_as_html is rendered in a browser, attacker-controlled script can execute in the viewer's origin, including in document-ingestion workflows where a privileged reviewer opens submitted content. This issue is fixed in version 0.24.1.

[ Fixes ]Fixes and patches

• unstructured 0.24.1Fixed version · GitHub Advisories · pip package unstructured: upgrade to 0.24.1 or later (affected <= 0.24.0)

[ Packages ]Affected open-source packages

• unstructured pipAffected <= 0.24.0 · fixed in 0.24.1 · GHSA-v5mq-3xhg-98m9

[ References ]References

• github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured/commit/cda16b3f2170019be9c6ea5635946fb3eaa2d66f
• github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured/pull/4394
• github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured/releases/tag/0.24.1
• github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured/security/advisories/GHSA-v5mq-3xhg-98m9