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AccountRecovery description field should be delimited in Zendesk ticket
Closed, ResolvedPublicSecurity

Description

A user submitting an account recovery request can put arbitrary text into the "description" field, which they could use to forge additional fields below the description and attempt to trick the person reading the ticket.

We should delimit the description field in the ticket body, putting it in between a banner, something like this:

=== Begin user-supplied description (untrusted) ===
{description}
=== End user-supplied description ===

(This task is based on a security review of Special:AccountRecovery that @kostajh did using Claude Code.)

Details

Risk Rating
Medium
Author Affiliation
WMF Product
Related Changes in Gerrit:

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript
sbassett changed the task status from Open to In Progress.May 11 2026, 4:32 PM
sbassett assigned this task to Mstyles.
sbassett triaged this task as Medium priority.
sbassett moved this task from Incoming to In Progress on the Security-Team board.
sbassett added a project: SecTeam-Processed.
sbassett moved this task from Inbox to Triaged (backlog) on the Product Safety and Integrity board.

Any objections to posting this on Gerrit?

Change #1286455 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/EmailAuth@master] Add delimiter to AccountRecovery description field

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1286455

sbassett moved this task from In Progress to Our Part Is Done on the Security-Team board.
sbassett changed the visibility from "Custom Policy" to "Public (No Login Required)".
sbassett changed the edit policy from "Custom Policy" to "All Users".
sbassett changed Risk Rating from N/A to Medium.