Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in rails-html-sanitizer

HIGH 7.5CVE-2022-23517 · GHSA-5x79-w82f-gw8w · Published 14/12/2022 · updated 17/06/2026

Package	Affected versions	Patched versions
rails-html-sanitizer RubyGems	`< 1.4.4`	`1.4.4`
rails html sanitizers rubyonrails	`< 1.4.4`	`1.4.4`

Description

Summary

Certain configurations of rails-html-sanitizer < 1.4.4 use an inefficient regular expression that is susceptible to excessive backtracking when attempting to sanitize certain SVG attributes. This may lead to a denial of service through CPU resource consumption.

Mitigation

Upgrade to rails-html-sanitizer >= 1.4.4.

Severity

The maintainers have evaluated this as High Severity 7.5 (CVSS3.1).

References

Credit

This vulnerability was responsibly reported by @ooooooo-q (https://github.com/ooooooo-q).

NVD description

rails-html-sanitizer is responsible for sanitizing HTML fragments in Rails applications. Certain configurations of rails-html-sanitizer < 1.4.4 use an inefficient regular expression that is susceptible to excessive backtracking when attempting to sanitize certain SVG attributes. This may lead to a denial of service through CPU resource consumption. This issue has been patched in version 1.4.4.

References

rails/rails-html-sanitizer security advisory · WEB
nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-23517 · ADVISORY
rails/rails-html-sanitizer commit 56c61c0 · WEB
hackerone.com/reports/1684163 · WEB
rails/rails-html-sanitizer · PACKAGE
rubysec/ruby-advisory-db · WEB
lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/09/msg00012.html · WEB
lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/09/msg00045.html · WEB

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