CISA Adds Five-Year-Old jQuery XSS Flaw to Exploited Vulnerabilities List
Jan 24, 2025
Vulnerability / JavaScript
 The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday placed  a now-patched security flaw impacting the popular jQuery JavaScript library to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation.  The medium-severity vulnerability is CVE-2020-11023  (CVSS score: 6.1/6.9), a nearly five-year-old cross-site scripting (XSS) bug that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution.  "Passing HTML containing <option> elements from untrusted sources - even after sanitizing them - to one of jQuery's DOM manipulation methods (i.e. .html(), .append(), and others) may execute untrusted code," according to a GitHub advisory  released for the flaw.   The problem was addressed  in jQuery version 3.5.0 released in April 2020. A workaround for CVE-2020-11023 involves using DOMPurify  with the SAFE_FOR_JQUERY flag  set to sanitize the HTML string before passing it to a jQuery method.  As is typically the case, t...