Junglewise Threat Intelligence

Excalidraw vulnerable to XSS via Mermaid sequence diagram labels (KaTeX rendering)

Severity: medium · Published 2026-04-24

Technologies: @excalidraw/excalidraw (npm). Vendors: npm.

Executive brief

### Impact

`@excalidraw/excalidraw@0.18.0` depends on a Mermaid conversion package version that resolves to a Mermaid release affected by CVE-2025-54881 / GHSA-7rqq-prvp-x9jh. User-supplied Mermaid sequence diagram labels could trigger XSS through Mermaid’s KaTeX label rendering path.

This is patched in `@excalidraw/excalidraw@0.18.1` by updating `@excalidraw/mermaid-to-excalidraw` to `2.2.2`, which uses a patched Mermaid 11 release.

Moderate severity as this XSS requires manual user action - pasting unsafe Mermaid diagram into the Excalidraw editor. No semi-automated attack vector exists by default (such as accessing a link).

### Patches

- Stable `@excalidraw/excalidraw@0.18.1` is patched. - Unstable `@excalidraw/excalidraw@next` has resolved to patched builds since `@excalidraw/excalidraw@0.18.0-f29edf` on 2025-08-21. - Direct consumers of `@excalidraw/mermaid-to-excalidraw` should use `1.1.3` or later.

### Workarounds

None.

### Resources

- Upstream Mermaid advisory: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/security/advisories/GHSA-7rqq-prvp-x9jh - CVE-2025-54881

Affected products

  • npm @excalidraw/mermaid-to-excalidraw
  • npm @excalidraw/excalidraw

References

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