Medium · published September 9, 2026
HTML::FormHandler versions before 0.410000 for Perl allow cross-site scripting via a submitted value rendered unescaped in an error message.
The wrappers and renderers that emit a form's errors interpolate the error string straight into HTML with no escaping. Two of the library's own messages, no_match and not_allowed, splice the submitted value into that string, and a failing type constraint puts the rejected value into the message it builds, which _apply_actions hands to add_error.
A field declared with a check regexp, a check list or a type constraint reaches those messages, with no custom validator and no non-default configuration. Errors rendered through an application's own escaping template layer rather than the library's rendering roles are not affected.
A request over the network that submits markup to such a field gets it back live inside the error span, running script in the victim's origin. Re-rendering a rejected value later gives the stored variant.