Description

HCL AION is affected by a vulnerability where indirect prompt injection can lead to HTML injection in rendered output. Injected markup may be displayed to users, potentially resulting in unintended behavior or security impact under certain conditions.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "4.3",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-13T14:16:55.723Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-13T14:16:55.723Z",
  "executiveSummary": "HCL AION is affected by an indirect prompt injection vulnerability that results in HTML injection within rendered output. This security flaw allows malicious or untrusted input, introduced via indirect prompt injection vectors, to be interpreted and rendered as HTML by the application. Consequently, injected markup is displayed directly to users interacting with the rendered output. The primary impact of this vulnerability includes potential unintended application behavior and localized security implications depending on the specific rendering context and user interaction. The affected system is HCL AION. Attackers capable of supplying or influencing indirect prompts can leverage this vector to inject arbitrary HTML tags and attributes into the application user interface. Exploitation relies on the application's failure to adequately sanitize, encode, or escape dynamically generated content prior to rendering it in the user's browser or interface. While the vulnerability stems from indirect prompt injection, the ultimate manifestation is markup injection, posing risks to UI integrity and potentially facilitating downstream client-side attacks if advanced scripts or payloads bypass context restrictions. Organizations deploying HCL AION must evaluate rendering mechanisms and implement robust output encoding defenses to neutralize the risk of injected markup execution.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability resides in the output rendering pipeline of HCL AION, where data influenced by indirect prompt injection is processed and displayed to users without proper sanitization or context-aware output encoding. The root cause of the issue is the lack of strict input validation and HTML entity encoding in components responsible for rendering dynamic text output derived from external inputs or prompt-driven mechanisms.\nExploitation occurs when an attacker crafts or introduces a malicious payload via an indirect prompt injection vector. When the system processes this input and subsequently incorporates the generated response into the user interface, the payload is treated as executable HTML markup rather than inert plain text. The attack flow proceeds as follows: first, the attacker injects malicious content into a data source or prompt context processed by HCL AION. Second, the application generates an output based on the compromised prompt without neutralizing HTML control characters. Third, the rendering component outputs the raw markup directly to the client interface. Finally, the user views the rendered output, causing the injected HTML elements to be parsed and displayed by the rendering engine.\nThe vulnerable component involves the user-facing output generation and rendering functions within HCL AION. The payload behavior consists of injecting arbitrary HTML tags, which are then rendered in the context of the victim user's session. Depending on the environment and client-side security policies, this can lead to UI redressing, layout manipulation, or the display of deceptive content. Network exposure, authentication requirements, privilege requirements, and specific affected version numbers are determined by the deployment configuration of HCL AION, but the flaw fundamentally impacts the integrity of rendered data streams presented to authenticated or unauthenticated users interacting with the application."
}