Goals of Bleach ¶

This document lists the goals and non-goals of Bleach. My hope is that by focusing on these goals and explicitly listing the non-goals, the project will evolve in a stronger direction.

Contents

Goals of Bleach
- Goals
- Non-Goals

Goals ¶

Always take a allowed-list-based approach ¶

Bleach should always take a allowed-list-based approach to markup filtering. Specifying disallowed lists is error-prone and not future proof.

For example, you should have to opt-in to allowing the onclick attribute, not opt-out of all the other on* attributes. Future versions of HTML may add new event handlers, like ontouch, that old disallow would not prevent.

Main goal is to sanitize input of malicious content ¶

The primary goal of Bleach is to sanitize user input that is allowed to contain some HTML as markup and is to be included in the content of a larger page. Examples might include:

User comments on a blog.
“Bio” sections of a user profile.
Descriptions of a product or application.

These examples, and others, are traditionally prone to security issues like XSS or other script injection, or annoying issues like unclosed tags and invalid markup. Bleach will take a proactive, allowed-list-only approach to allowing HTML content, and will use the HTML5 parsing algorithm to handle invalid markup.

See the chapter on clean() for more info.

Safely create links ¶

The secondary goal of Bleach is to provide a mechanism for finding or altering links (<a> tags with href attributes, or things that look like URLs or email addresses) in text.

While Bleach itself will always operate on a allowed-list-based security model, the linkify() method is flexible enough to allow the creation, alteration, and removal of links based on an extremely wide range of use cases.

Non-Goals ¶

Bleach is designed to work with fragments of HTML by untrusted users. Some non-goal use cases include:

Sanitize complete HTML documents ¶

Once you’re creating whole documents, you have to allow so many tags that a disallow-list approach (e.g. forbidding <script> or <object>) may be more appropriate.

Remove all HTML or transforming content for some non-web-page purpose ¶

There are much faster tools available if you want to remove or escape all HTML from a document.

Clean up after trusted users ¶

Bleach is powerful but it is not fast. If you trust your users, trust them and don’t rely on Bleach to clean up their mess.

Make malicious content look pretty or sane ¶

Malicious content is designed to be malicious. Making it safe is a design goal of Bleach. Making it pretty or sane-looking is not.

If you want your malicious content to look pretty, you should pass it through Bleach to make it safe and then do your own transform afterwards.

Allow arbitrary styling ¶

There are a number of interesting CSS properties that can do dangerous things, like Opera’s -o-link. Painful as it is, if you want your users to be able to change nearly anything in a style attribute, you should have to opt into this.