CVE-2022-23517 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in rails-html-sanitizer

What is CVE-2022-23517?

CVE-2022-23517 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 14 Dec 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official 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.

Weakness: CWE-1333

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-23517?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including rails-html-sanitizer. It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Rubyonrails Rails Html Sanitizers.

How do I fix CVE-2022-23517?

Upgrade rails-html-sanitizer to 1.4.4 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2022-23517 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-23517 in the wild and no public exploit code.

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All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2022-23517, GHSA-5x79-w82f-gw8w, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-23517.