VDB
KO
HIGH 7.5

GHSA-c4rq-3m3g-8wgx

Nokogiri CSS selector tokenizer has regular expression backtracking

Details

## Summary

Nokogiri's CSS selector tokenizer contains regular expressions whose construction may result in exponential regex backtracking on adversarial selectors. Three ReDoS vectors are addressed in this release:

1. String-literal tokenization on certain unterminated quoted-string input. 2. String-literal tokenization on a separate class of hex-escape-rich input. 3. Identifier tokenization on hex-escape-rich input.

The public CSS selector methods that funnel through the affected tokenizer are `Nokogiri::CSS.xpath_for`, `Node#css`, `Node#at_css`, `Searchable#search`, and `CSS::Parser#parse`.

## Mitigation

Upgrade to Nokogiri `>= 1.19.3`.

If users are unable to upgrade, two options are available:

- Avoid the use of attacker-controlled text in CSS selectors. Applications that only pass developer-authored selectors to Nokogiri are not directly exposed. - Set global `Regexp.timeout` (Ruby 3.2+, JRuby 9.4+) to bound parse time.

## Severity

The Nokogiri maintainers have evaluated this as **High Severity** (CVSS 7.5, `AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H`).

An attacker able to inject user-supplied text into a CSS selector parse method can cause exponential backtracking, resulting in a potential denial of service.

## Resources

- [CWE-1333: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity](https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1333.html)

## Credit

Vector 1 was responsibly reported by @colby-swandale. Vectors 2 and 3 were discovered by @flavorjones during the response to the original report.

Are you affected?

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Affected packages

RubyGems / nokogiri
Introduced in: 0 Fixed in: 1.19.3
Fix bundle update nokogiri

References