GHSA-2gmv-2r3v-jxj2Medium

Stored XSS in PySpector HTML Report Generation leads to Javascript Code Execution

Published
March 18, 2026
Last Modified
March 20, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

Summary

PySpector versions <= 0.1.6 are affected by a stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the HTML report generator. When PySpector scans a Python file containing JavaScript payloads (i.e. inside a string passed to eval() ), the flagged code snippet is interpolated into the HTML report without sanitization. Opening the generated report in a browser causes the embedded JavaScript to execute in the browser's local file context.

Impact

An attacker can craft a malicious Python file (for example, hosted in a public repository), designed to be scanned by PySpector. When a victim scans this file and opens the resulting HTML report, arbitrary JavaScript executes in their browser. While the file:// context limits the attacker's ability to exfiltrate cookies or make credentialed requests, the following is still achievable:

  • Arbitrary DOM manipulation
  • Redirects to attacker-controlled pages
  • Theft of locally accessible data via fetch() or XMLHttpRequest to file:// paths (browser-dependent)

Any user of PySpector who scans untrusted code and generates HTML reports, is potentially affected.

PoC

The following steps reproduce the vulnerability on PySpector <= 0.1.6:

  1. Create a malicious Python file containing a JavaScript payload embedded in a string argument to eval(), and run PySpector against the file, generating an HTML report:
  2. Open the generated HTML report in any browser:

🎯 Affected products1

  • pip/pyspector:<= 0.1.6

🔗 References (3)