rails-html-sanitize has XSS vulnerability with certain configurations

Summary

There is a possible XSS vulnerability with certain configurations of Rails::HTML::Sanitizer 1.6.0 when used with Rails >= 7.1.0 and Nokogiri < 1.15.7, or 1.16.x < 1.16.8.

• Versions affected: 1.6.0
• Not affected: < 1.6.0
• Fixed versions: 1.6.1

Please note that the fix in v1.6.1 is to update the dependency on Nokogiri to 1.15.7 or >= 1.16.8.

Impact

A possible XSS vulnerability with certain configurations of Rails::HTML::Sanitizer may allow an attacker to inject content if HTML5 sanitization is enabled and the application developer has overridden the sanitizer's allowed tags in either of the following ways:

• allow both "math" and "style" elements
• or allow both "svg" and "style" elements

Code is only impacted if Rails is configured to use HTML5 sanitization, please see documentation for config.action_view.sanitizer_vendor and config.action_text.sanitizer_vendor for more information on these configuration options.

Code is only impacted if allowed tags are being overridden. Applications may be doing this in a few different ways:

1. using application configuration to configure Action View sanitizers' allowed tags:

# In config/application.rb
config.action_view.sanitized_allowed_tags = ["math", "style"]
# or
config.action_view.sanitized_allowed_tags = ["svg", "style"]

see https://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#configuring-action-view

2. using a :tags option to the Action View helper sanitize:

<%= sanitize @comment.body, tags: ["math", "style"] %>
<%# or %>
<%= sanitize @comment.body, tags: ["svg", "style"] %>

see https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/SanitizeHelper.html#method-i-sanitize

3. setting Rails::HTML5::SafeListSanitizer class attribute allowed_tags:

# class-level option
Rails::HTML5::SafeListSanitizer.allowed_tags = ["math", "style"]
# or
Rails::HTML5::SafeListSanitizer.allowed_tags = ["svg", "style"]