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CVE-2023-24538 Critical

Backticks not treated as string delimiters in html/template

Templates do not properly consider backticks (`) as Javascript string delimiters, and do not escape them as expected. Backticks are used, since ES6, for JS template literals. If a template contains a Go template action within a Javascript template literal, the contents of the action can be used to terminate the literal, injecting arbitrary Javascript code into the Go template. As ES6 template literals are rather complex, and themselves can do string interpolation, the decision was made to simply disallow Go template actions from being used inside of them (e.g. "var a = {{.}}"), since there is no obviously safe way to allow this behavior. This takes the same approach as github.com/google/safehtml. With fix, Template.Parse returns an Error when it encounters templates like this, with an ErrorCode of value 12. This ErrorCode is currently unexported, but will be exported in the release of Go 1.21. Users who rely on the previous behavior can re-enable it using the GODEBUG flag jstmpllitinterp=1, with the caveat that backticks will now be escaped. This should be used with caution.

Exploit probability 2.3%
Published April 5, 2023
Required by Not available
Last source change February 4, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Unknown Unknown

152 explicit affected versions

Go stdlib
Bitnami golang

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities GO-2023-1703

Templates do not properly consider backticks (`) as Javascript string delimiters, and do not escape them as expected. Backticks are used, since ES6, for JS template literals. If a template contains a Go template action within a Javascript template literal, the contents of the action can be used to terminate the literal, injecting arbitrary Javascript code into the Go template. As ES6 template literals are rather complex, and themselves can do string interpolation, the decision was made to simply disallow Go template actions from being used inside of them (e.g. "var a = {{.}}"), since there is no obviously safe way to allow this behavior. This takes the same approach as github.com/google/safehtml. With fix, Template.Parse returns an Error when it encounters templates like this, with an ErrorCode of value 12. This ErrorCode is currently unexported, but will be exported in the release of Go 1.21. Users who rely on the previous behavior can re-enable it using the GODEBUG flag jstmpllitinterp=1, with the caveat that backticks will now be escaped. This should be used with caution.

View original source
Open Source Vulnerabilities BIT-golang-2023-24538

Templates do not properly consider backticks (`) as Javascript string delimiters, and do not escape them as expected. Backticks are used, since ES6, for JS template literals. If a template contains a Go template action within a Javascript template literal, the contents of the action can be used to terminate the literal, injecting arbitrary Javascript code into the Go template. As ES6 template literals are rather complex, and themselves can do string interpolation, the decision was made to simply disallow Go template actions from being used inside of them (e.g. "var a = {{.}}"), since there is no obviously safe way to allow this behavior. This takes the same approach as github.com/google/safehtml. With fix, Template.Parse returns an Error when it encounters templates like this, with an ErrorCode of value 12. This ErrorCode is currently unexported, but will be exported in the release of Go 1.21. Users who rely on the previous behavior can re-enable it using the GODEBUG flag jstmpllitinterp=1, with the caveat that backticks will now be escaped. This should be used with caution.

View original source
Open Source Vulnerabilities CVE-2023-24538

Templates do not properly consider backticks (`) as Javascript string delimiters, and do not escape them as expected. Backticks are used, since ES6, for JS template literals. If a template contains a Go template action within a Javascript template literal, the contents of the action can be used to terminate the literal, injecting arbitrary Javascript code into the Go template. As ES6 template literals are rather complex, and themselves can do string interpolation, the decision was made to simply disallow Go template actions from being used inside of them (e.g. "var a = {{.}}"), since there is no obviously safe way to allow this behavior. This takes the same approach as github.com/google/safehtml. With fix, Template.Parse returns an Error when it encounters templates like this, with an ErrorCode of value 12. This ErrorCode is currently unexported, but will be exported in the release of Go 1.21. Users who rely on the previous behavior can re-enable it using the GODEBUG flag jstmpllitinterp=1, with the caveat that backticks will now be escaped. This should be used with caution.

View original source

05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence