Nokogiri: Null Pointer Dereference calling methods on uninitialized wrapper classes

Summary

Nokogiri contains a bug when calling certain methods on allocated-but-uninitialized native wrapper classes that inherit from Nokogiri::XML::Node. This caused a NULL pointer dereference that could crash the process.

Nokogiri 1.19.4 checks for missing native data pointers and raises a RuntimeError.

JRuby is not affected.

Severity

The Nokogiri maintainers have evaluated this as low severity. This is only triggered by a programming error. It requires application code to call .allocate directly on a native-backed class and then invoke methods on the resulting uninitialized object. It cannot be triggered by untrusted input or through normal use of the public API.

Mitigation

Upgrade to Nokogiri 1.19.4 or later.

Avoid calling .allocate directly on Nokogiri native-backed classes. Use the documented constructors and factory methods instead.

Credit

This issue was responsibly reported by Zheng Yu from depthfirst.com.