CVE-2026-44429: MCP Registry vulnerable to stored XSS in catalogue UI via attribute-quote breakout in publisher-controlled `websiteUrl`
(updated )
The public catalogue UI served at GET / (file internal/api/handlers/v0/ui_index.html) is vulnerable to stored cross-site scripting via the server.websiteUrl field of any published server.json. Server-side validation in internal/validators/validators.go (validateWebsiteURL) only checks that the URL parses, is absolute, and uses the https scheme; it does not reject quote characters. Client-side, the value is interpolated into a double-quoted href attribute via innerHTML, using a homegrown escapeHtml helper that performs the standard textContent → innerHTML round-trip. Per the HTML serialisation algorithm, that round-trip encodes only &, <, > and U+00A0 inside text nodes — it does not encode " or '. A literal " in websiteUrl therefore breaks out of the href attribute, allowing arbitrary on* event handlers to be appended to the same <a> element. The Content-Security-Policy on / is script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://cdn.tailwindcss.com, so the injected event handlers execute.
Any user able to obtain a publish token (e.g. via POST /v0/auth/github-at with their own GitHub account, or POST /v0/auth/none on a deployment that has anonymous auth enabled) can plant a poisoned record visible to every visitor of the registry homepage.
References
- github.com/advisories/GHSA-rqv2-m695-f8j4
- github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/commit/78b7bbde07948049b916d76b4769faee461ff930
- github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/pull/1249
- github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/releases/tag/v1.7.7
- github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/security/advisories/GHSA-rqv2-m695-f8j4
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-44429
Code Behaviors & Features
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