Read the Docs vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Date: 2022-11
Affected: npm/readthedocs
Attack vector: xss
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Medium
CWE: CWE-79

### Impact This vulnerability allowed a malicious user to serve arbitrary HTML files from the main application domain (readthedocs[.]org/readthedocs[.]com) by exploiting a vulnerability in the code that serves downloadable content from a project. Exploiting this would have required the attacker to get a logged-in user to visit the malicious URL, which would have allowed the attacker to take control of the user's session with JavaScript (making requests to the API/site on behalf of the user). This URL would have looked something like `hxxps[:]//readthedocs[.]org/projects/attacker-project/downloads/html/version-with-javascript-attack/`. ### Patches This issue has been patched in our 8.8.1 release.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):