Security vulnerabilities

  • Status Closed
  • Assigned To
    cbay
  • Private
Attached to Project: Security vulnerabilities
Opened by yadesh - 23.04.2025
Last edited by cbay - 23.04.2025

FS#159 - Bug Report: Unstyled XML Sitemap Response on Public Endpoint

URL:https://www.alwaysdata.com/en/sitemap.xml

🔍 Issue Summary:
The sitemap XML at the above URL is accessible but lacks associated XSL styling, causing the browser to display a raw XML tree with a message stating:

"This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

💡 Expected Behavior:
The sitemap should either:

Include a reference to an XSL stylesheet to format the output for human readability, OR

Deliver plain XML without browser-rendered HTML or inline styles/CSS that could lead to unintended display artifacts.

📋 Actual Behavior:
The XML document is correctly structured and functional.

However, extraneous CSS code appears to be injected into the XML, potentially due to frontend theme/style conflicts or incorrect server handling.

🧪 Steps to Reproduce:
Navigate to https://www.alwaysdata.com/en/sitemap.xml in any browser.

Observe the browser warning about missing style information.

Scroll down to see unexpected CSS classes and style rules (e.g., .aifnmjmchg.light, :host([class=light])), which are not part of a standard sitemap file.

🧠 Root Cause Hypothesis:
The web server may be unintentionally injecting global CSS or theme-related JavaScript/CSS into all responses, including .xml files.

This could be a misconfigured template handler or inclusion of global styles across all content types.

🎯 Suggested Fix:
Ensure that the sitemap endpoint delivers pure XML with proper MIME type (application/xml) without CSS injection.

Optionally, provide an XSL stylesheet for better browser presentation if needed.

Review middleware or template rendering logic that might be appending global assets to all responses.

✅ Impact:
SEO crawlers are likely unaffected.

However, human readability is degraded, and it may hint at larger asset delivery misconfigurations.

Potentially impacts maintainability, developer trust, or bug bounty program quality.

Closed by  cbay
23.04.2025 14:29
Reason for closing:  Invalid
Admin
cbay commented on 23.04.2025 14:29

Hello,

That's not only normal, but not a security issue at all. You can see Google's one for instance, which is the same.

Kind regards,
Cyril

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