JSF SelectItems and escaping (xss) - jsf

Question

there is a selectOneMenu in my example with a f:selectItems-attribute. The select-items are resolved from my bean like this:
<h:selectOneMenu value="#{bean.value}">
<f:selectItems value="#{bean.selectItems}" var="obj" itemValue="#{obj}" itemLabel="#{obj.name}"/>
</h:selectOneMenu>
The method getSelectItems() in my bean looks like that:
public List<MyObject> getSelectItems() {
List<MyObject> list = new LinkedList<MyObject>();
MyObject obj = new MyObject("Peter");
list.add(obj);
return list;
}
The objects that are displayed are simple objects with a attribute "name".
Nothing special up to this point. But now i change my method to that:
public List<MyObject> getSelectItems() {
List<MyObject> list = new LinkedList<MyObject>();
MyObject obj = new MyObject("<script>alert('xss is bad');</script>");
list.add(obj);
return list;
}
The javascript doesn´t get escaped by MenuRenderer-Class and my page shows me the alert-message.
Is there any cause why the default value of the escape-attribute of SelectItem is "false"?
How can i fix that problem? (I use Mojarra 2.1.7)

Answer 1

The default should indeed not have been false. I've reported it as issue 2747.
In the meanwhile, add itemLabelEscaped="true" to escape it anyway.
<f:selectItems ... itemLabelEscaped="true" />
Note that this is only necessary when you're using GenericObjectSelectItems, i.e. when you're supplying a E[]/List<E>/Map<K, V> instead of List<SelectItem>/SelectItem[]. Also note that escaping is only absolutely mandatory when it concerns user-controlled input (which is fortunately very rarely the case in dropdown values).