VDB
KO
LOW

GHSA-8whx-365g-h9vv

Loofah `allowed_uri?` does not detect `javascript:` URIs split by named whitespace character references

Quick fix

GHSA-8whx-365g-h9vv — loofah: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

bundle update loofah

Details

## Summary

`Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri?` does not correctly reject `javascript:` URIs when the scheme is split or prefixed by the HTML5 named character references `	` (tab) or `
` (line feed).

This is a bypass of the fix for [GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m](https://github.com/flavorjones/loofah/security/advisories/GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m), which handled the equivalent numeric character references (`	`, `
`, `
`) but did not cover the named forms.

## Details

`allowed_uri?` decodes HTML entities with `CGI.unescapeHTML`, which handles numeric character references but not HTML5 named character references. Payloads like `java	script:alert(1)` are therefore left intact, so the method does not recognize the `javascript:` scheme and returns `true`. A browser, however, decodes `	` and `
` to tab and line feed and strips them from the URL during parsing, producing `javascript:alert(1)`.

`	` and `
` are the only relevant named character references: across the HTML5 named-character table, they are the only two that decode to characters the WHATWG URL parser strips from a URL (U+0009 and U+000A; there is no named reference for U+000D). ` ` / ` ` decode to U+00A0, which browsers do not strip, so they aren't usable for this bypass.

Note that Loofah's default `sanitize()` path is **not** affected, because Nokogiri decodes or entity-escapes HTML entities during parsing before Loofah evaluates the URI protocol. This issue only affects callers of the public `allowed_uri?` string-level helper that pass it HTML-encoded strings.

## Impact

Callers that validate a user-controlled URL with `Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri?` and then render the approved value into an `href` or other browser-interpreted URI attribute may be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS). This includes applications that call `allowed_uri?` directly, as well as higher-level features built on top of it, such as Action Text 8.2's markdown link validation.

## Mitigation

Upgrade to Loofah >= 2.25.2.

## Credit

Responsibly reported by GitHub user @connorshea.

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Affected packages

RubyGems / loofah
Introduced in: 2.25.0 Fixed in: 2.25.2
Fix bundle update loofah

References