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GHSA-wfpw-mmfh-qq69
No affected components available
Summary
XInclude substitution performed by Nokogiri::XML::Node#do_xinclude replaced each <xi:include> in place, freeing the include node along with its children (such as <xi:fallback> and its descendants) and any namespaces declared on them. If an application had already exposed one of those nodes or namespaces to Ruby, the corresponding Ruby object was left pointing at freed memory. Using the object could result in invalid reads or writes to memory.
Nokogiri 1.19.4 substitutes each <xi:include> on a defensive copy by default, so the structures libxml2 frees are never the ones bound to live Ruby objects.
Only the CRuby implementation is affected; JRuby is not affected.
Severity
The Nokogiri maintainers have evaluated this as low severity. Reaching it requires an unusual API-usage pattern that does not arise during normal use. The application must parse a document without XInclude, traverse into an <xi:include> subtree to expose its nodes or namespaces to Ruby, and only then invoke XInclude processing. The common case, requesting XInclude at parse time, operates on a freshly parsed document whose nodes are not yet exposed to Ruby and is not affected. Nokogiri 1.19.4 makes this pattern safe by default and requires no change to application code.
Mitigation
Upgrade to Nokogiri 1.19.4 or later.
As a workaround for earlier versions, perform XInclude substitution at parse time (with the xinclude parse option) rather than calling #do_xinclude on a document that has already been traversed. A freshly parsed document has no nodes exposed to Ruby, so the substitution is safe.
Credit
This issue was responsibly reported by Zheng Yu from depthfirst.com.
Measures severity based on intrinsic characteristics of the vulnerability, independent of environment.
No exploitation activity has been observed at this time. Continue routine monitoring.
The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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