CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-53988 — 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. There is a possible XSS vulnerability with certain configurations of Rails::HTML::Sanitizer 1.6.0 when used with Rails >= 7.1.0. A possible XSS vulnerability with certain configurations of Rails::HTML::Sanitizer may allow an attacker to inject content if HTML5 sanitization is enabled and the application developer has overridden the sanitizer's allowed tags where the "math", "mtext", "table", and "style" elements are allowed and either either "mglyph" or "malignmark" are allowed. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.6.1.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.1 (3.1)
Published
2024-12-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-79

Affected products

  • rubyonrails / rails_html_sanitizers / 1.6.0

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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