Python HTML sanitizer / scrubber / filter

Question

Does anyone have experience using a Python HTML sanitizer / scrubber / filter?

I'm looking for a module that will remove any HTML tags from a string that are not found in a whitelist. Of course I've Googled it but haven't found anything definitive.

Thanks, Everett

Answer 1

Here's a simple solution using BeautifulSoup:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

VALID_TAGS = ['strong', 'em', 'p', 'ul', 'li', 'br']

def sanitize_html(value):

    soup = BeautifulSoup(value)

    for tag in soup.findAll(True):
        if tag.name not in VALID_TAGS:
            tag.hidden = True

    return soup.renderContents()

If you want to remove the contents of the invalid tags as well, substitute tag.extract() for tag.hidden.

You might also look into using lxml and Tidy.

Answer 2

Have you tried with BeautifulSoup?

Answer 3

The above solutions via Beautiful Soup will not work. You might be able to hack something with Beautiful Soup above and beyond them, because Beautiful Soup provides access to the parse tree. In a while, I think I'll try to solve the problem properly, but it's a week-long project or so, and I don't have a free week soon.

Just to be specific, not only will Beautiful Soup throw exceptions for some parsing errors which the above code doesn't catch; but also, there are plenty of very real XSS vulnerabilities that aren't caught, like:

<<script>script> alert("Haha, I hacked your page."); </</script>script>

Probably the best thing that you can do is instead to strip out the < element as <, to prohibit all HTML, and then use a restricted subset like Markdown to render formatting properly. In particular, you can also go back and re-introduce common bits of HTML with a regex. Here's what the process looks like, roughly:

_lt_     = re.compile('<')
_tc_ = '~(lt)~'   # or whatever, so long as markdown doesn't mangle it.     
_ok_ = re.compile(_tc_ + '(/?(?:u|b|i|em|strong|sup|sub|p|br|q|blockquote|code))>', re.I)
_sqrt_ = re.compile(_tc_ + 'sqrt>', re.I)     #just to give an example of extending
_endsqrt_ = re.compile(_tc_ + '/sqrt>', re.I) #html syntax with your own elements.
_tcre_ = re.compile(_tc_)

def sanitize(text):
    text = _lt_.sub(_tc_, text)
    text = markdown(text)
    text = _ok_.sub(r'<\1>', text)
    text = _sqrt_.sub(r'&radic;<span style="text-decoration:overline;">', text)
    text = _endsqrt_.sub(r'</span>', text)
    return _tcre_.sub('&lt;', text)

I haven't tested that code yet, so there may be bugs. But you see the general idea: you have to blacklist all HTML in general before you whitelist the ok stuff.

Answer 4

Here is what i use in my own project. The acceptable_elements/attributes come from feedparser and BeautifulSoup does the work.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

acceptable_elements = ['a', 'abbr', 'acronym', 'address', 'area', 'b', 'big',
      'blockquote', 'br', 'button', 'caption', 'center', 'cite', 'code', 'col',
      'colgroup', 'dd', 'del', 'dfn', 'dir', 'div', 'dl', 'dt', 'em',
      'font', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6', 'hr', 'i', 'img', 
      'ins', 'kbd', 'label', 'legend', 'li', 'map', 'menu', 'ol', 
      'p', 'pre', 'q', 's', 'samp', 'small', 'span', 'strike',
      'strong', 'sub', 'sup', 'table', 'tbody', 'td', 'tfoot', 'th',
      'thead', 'tr', 'tt', 'u', 'ul', 'var']

acceptable_attributes = ['abbr', 'accept', 'accept-charset', 'accesskey',
  'action', 'align', 'alt', 'axis', 'border', 'cellpadding', 'cellspacing',
  'char', 'charoff', 'charset', 'checked', 'cite', 'clear', 'cols',
  'colspan', 'color', 'compact', 'coords', 'datetime', 'dir', 
  'enctype', 'for', 'headers', 'height', 'href', 'hreflang', 'hspace',
  'id', 'ismap', 'label', 'lang', 'longdesc', 'maxlength', 'method',
  'multiple', 'name', 'nohref', 'noshade', 'nowrap', 'prompt', 
  'rel', 'rev', 'rows', 'rowspan', 'rules', 'scope', 'shape', 'size',
  'span', 'src', 'start', 'summary', 'tabindex', 'target', 'title', 'type',
  'usemap', 'valign', 'value', 'vspace', 'width']

def clean_html( fragment ):
    while True:
        soup = BeautifulSoup( fragment )
        removed = False        
        for tag in soup.findAll(True): # find all tags
            if tag.name not in acceptable_elements:
                tag.extract() # remove the bad ones
                removed = True
            else: # it might have bad attributes
                # a better way to get all attributes?
                for attr in tag._getAttrMap().keys():
                    if attr not in acceptable_attributes:
                        del tag[attr]

        # turn it back to html
        fragment = unicode(soup)

        if removed:
            # we removed tags and tricky can could exploit that!
            # we need to reparse the html until it stops changing
            continue # next round

        return fragment

Some small tests to make sure this behaves correctly:

tests = [   #text should work
            ('<p>this is text</p>but this too', '<p>this is text</p>but this too'),
            # make sure we cant exploit removal of tags
            ('<<script></script>script> alert("Haha, I hacked your page."); <<script></script>/script>', ''),
            # try the same trick with attributes, gives an Exception
            ('<div on<script></script>load="alert("Haha, I hacked your page.");">1</div>',  Exception),
             # no tags should be skipped
            ('<script>bad</script><script>bad</script><script>bad</script>', ''),
            # leave valid tags but remove bad attributes
            ('<a href="good" onload="bad" onclick="bad" alt="good">1</div>', '<a href="good" alt="good">1</a>'),
]

for text, out in tests:
    try:
        res = clean_html(text)
        assert res == out, "%s => %s != %s" % (text, res, out)
    except out, e:
        assert isinstance(e, out), "Wrong exception %r" % e

Answer 5

Use lxml.html.clean!

Suppose the following html:

html = '''\
<html>
 <head>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="evil-site"></script>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/rss" src="evil-rss">
   <style>
     body {background-image: url(javascript:do_evil)};
     div {color: expression(evil)};
   </style>
 </head>
 <body onload="evil_function()">
    <!-- I am interpreted for EVIL! -->
   <a href="javascript:evil_function()">a link</a>
   <a href="#" onclick="evil_function()">another link</a>
   <p onclick="evil_function()">a paragraph</p>
   <div style="display: none">secret EVIL!</div>
   <object> of EVIL! </object>
   <iframe src="evil-site"></iframe>
   <form action="evil-site">
     Password: <input type="password" name="password">
   </form>
   <blink>annoying EVIL!</blink>
   <a href="evil-site">spam spam SPAM!</a>
   <image src="evil!">
 </body>
</html>'''

So easy!

from lxml.html.clean import clean_html
print clean_html(html)

The results...

<html>
  <body>
    <div>
      <style>/* deleted */</style>
      <a href="">a link</a>
      <a href="#">another link</a>
      <p>a paragraph</p>
      <div>secret EVIL!</div>
      of EVIL!
      Password:
      annoying EVIL!
      <a href="evil-site">spam spam SPAM!</a>
      <img src="evil!">
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

You can customize the elements you want to clean and whatnot.