Mermaid CVE-2026-50159

Summary

Mermaid does not fully restrict CSS to the rendered SVG subtree. Although selectors are prefixed with #mermaid-X, sibling (~ and +) combinators can still escape the Mermaid container and inject styles to DOM elements adjacent to the diagram <svg>.

Most users of mermaid would not be affected by this, as mermaid adds its <svg> as an only child of it's parent element. However, you may be affected if you manually insert the <svg> (or other elements) into the DOM yourself.

Details

Mermaid namespaces CSS through with a middleware intended to scope all rules to the diagram's SVG element. CSS nesting expands & ~ * { ... } to #svgId ~ *, which selects all sibling elements following the SVG in the DOM, outside the diagram boundary.

Impact

An attacker able to supply diagram source to a page (e.g., user-generated content rendered by Mermaid) could inject CSS rules affecting sibling elements to the diagram <svg> on the host page. This can be used for UI redressing, hiding content, conditional CSS-based probing, or phishing-style visual manipulation.

JavaScript execution is not possible via this vector.

Patches

This has been patched in https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/commit/12d472c9ed43f94814b110da8d7a9ae6dd5266ed and released in Mermaid v11.16.1.

A backport has been made for the v10 branch in 7e83f1533318b307764d961906a73377266f4c5e and was released in Mermaid v10.9.8

Workarounds

If you are inserting the <svg> into the DOM yourself, you can wrap it in an element with no other children, e.g. <div><svg>...</svg></div> or element.innerHTML = svg. Alternatively, you can use mermaid.run() or mermaid.initialize() which will do this for you.

Setting "securityLevel": "sandbox" will also prevent this, or setting the secure config value in the mermaid config to avoid allowing diagrams to modify fontFamily, themeCSS, altFontFamily, and themeVariables.

To test, you can try using a themeCSS with & + * { /* my CSS here */} and see if it's applied outside of your mermaid <svg>.

---
config:
  themeCSS: |-
    & + * { background:red !important; width:100vw !important; height:100vh !important; position:fixed !important; inset:0 !important; }
---
info

References

• GHSA-87f9-hvmw-gh4p/CVE-2026-41159 (related vulnerability)
• https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/commit/12d472c9ed43f94814b110da8d7a9ae6dd5266ed
• https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/releases/tag/mermaid%4011.16.1
• https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/commit/7e83f1533318b307764d961906a73377266f4c5e
• https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/releases/tag/v10.9.8