CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-23520 — rails-html-sanitizer is responsible for sanitizing HTML fragments in Rails applications

Medium CVSS 6.1

rails-html-sanitizer is responsible for sanitizing HTML fragments in Rails applications. Prior to version 1.4.4, there is a possible XSS vulnerability with certain configurations of Rails::Html::Sanitizer due to an incomplete fix of CVE-2022-32209. Rails::Html::Sanitizer may allow an attacker to inject content if the application developer has overridden the sanitizer's allowed tags to allow both "select" and "style" elements. Code is only impacted if allowed tags are being overridden. This issue is patched in version 1.4.4. All users overriding the allowed tags to include both "select" and "style" should either upgrade or use this workaround: Remove either "select" or "style" from the overridden allowed tags. NOTE: Code is _not_ impacted if allowed tags are overridden using either the :tags option to the Action View helper method sanitize or the :tags option to the instance method SafeListSanitizer#sanitize.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.1 (3.1)
Published
2022-12-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-79

Affected products

  • rubyonrails / rails_html_sanitizers
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

Matched remediation archetype

Cross-site scripting and unsafe browser output

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Check exposure

  • Trace reflected, stored, and DOM-derived untrusted values into HTML, attributes, URLs, styles, scripts, and client-side template sinks.
  • Identify affected origins, authenticated user roles, sensitive browser capabilities, and where content is shared across tenants.
  • Review framework escaping, rich-text sanitization, legacy templates, and client-side rendering paths.

Remediate safely

  • Use context-aware framework output encoding and safe DOM APIs; keep untrusted data out of executable contexts.
  • Sanitize intentionally supported markup with a maintained allowlist policy and validate URLs and attributes separately.
  • Update affected rendering components and add tests for every output context using inert sentinel markup.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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