CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-23517 — rails-html-sanitizer is responsible for sanitizing HTML fragments in Rails applications

High CVSS 7.5

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.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-12-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-1333

Affected products

  • rubyonrails / rails_html_sanitizers
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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