Loofah `allowed_uri?` does not detect `javascript:` URIs split by numeric character references without semicolons

Overview

Summary

Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri? does not correctly reject javascript: or vbscript: URIs when the scheme is split by a numeric character reference that has no trailing semicolon. A browser decodes such references and resolves the URL to an executable javascript: scheme, while allowed_uri? reports it safe.

This is a bypass of the fix for GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m, which handled numeric character references with a trailing ; (	, 
, 
) but did not cover the forms without semicolons.

Details

allowed_uri? decodes HTML entities with CGI.unescapeHTML, which decodes numeric character references only when they carry a trailing ;. A reference without a semicolon such as &#58 (colon) or &#9 (tab) is left literal, so the scheme-detection check finds no scheme, and the method falls through to its scheme-less path and returns true.

A browser, however, decodes numeric character references even without a trailing semicolon. An encoded colon such as &#58 becomes the : scheme separator, so javascript&#58alert(1) resolves to javascript:alert(1). Encoded whitespace such as &#9 (tab) is decoded and then stripped from the URL, rejoining the surrounding text, so java&#9script:alert(1) also resolves to javascript:alert(1). In both cases the URL executes while allowed_uri? approved it as safe.

Note that Loofah's default sanitize() path is not affected, because Nokogiri decodes or entity-escapes HTML entities during parsing before Loofah evaluates the URI protocol. This issue only affects callers of the public allowed_uri? string-level helper that pass it HTML-encoded strings.

Impact

Callers that validate a user-controlled URL with Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri? and then render the approved value into an href or other browser-interpreted URI attribute may be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS). This includes applications that call allowed_uri? directly, as well as higher-level features built on top of it, such as Action Text 8.2's markdown link validation.

Mitigation

Upgrade to Loofah >= 2.25.2.

Credit

Responsibly reported by GitHub user @MoonFuji.

Affected packages

• loofah >= 2.25.0, < 2.25.2

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• loofah 2.25.2