Loofah `allowed_uri?` does not detect `javascript:` URIs split by named whitespace character references

Overview

Summary

Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri? does not correctly reject javascript: URIs when the scheme is split or prefixed by the HTML5 named character references 	 (tab) or 
 (line feed).

This is a bypass of the fix for GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m, which handled the equivalent numeric character references (	, 
, 
) but did not cover the named forms.

Details

allowed_uri? decodes HTML entities with CGI.unescapeHTML, which handles numeric character references but not HTML5 named character references. Payloads like java	script:alert(1) are therefore left intact, so the method does not recognize the javascript: scheme and returns true. A browser, however, decodes 	 and 
 to tab and line feed and strips them from the URL during parsing, producing javascript:alert(1).

	 and 
 are the only relevant named character references: across the HTML5 named-character table, they are the only two that decode to characters the WHATWG URL parser strips from a URL (U+0009 and U+000A; there is no named reference for U+000D).   /   decode to U+00A0, which browsers do not strip, so they aren't usable for this bypass.

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 @connorshea.

Affected packages

• loofah >= 2.25.0, < 2.25.2

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• loofah 2.25.2