GitHub Advisoryadvisory · RubyGems
GHSA-2j22-pr5w-6gq8 Loofah has improper detection of disallowed URIs via `allowed_uri?`
LOW
Official page ↗
- Ecosystem
- RubyGems
- Packages
- loofah
- Severity
- Low
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:P/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- Weaknesses
- CWE-116, CWE-79
- Reviewed
- 2026-03-26
Affected packages
• RubyGems loofah: >= 2.25.0, < 2.25.1 → fixed in 2.25.1
Description
Summary
`Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri?` does not correctly reject `javascript:` URIs when the scheme is split by HTML entity-encoded control characters such as ` ` (carriage return), ` ` (line feed), or `	` (tab).
Details
The `allowed_uri?` method strips literal control characters before decoding HTML entities. Payloads like `java script:alert(1)` survive the control character strip, then ` ` is decoded to a carriage return, producing `java\rscript:alert(1)`.
Note that the Loofah sanitizer's default `sanitize()` path is not affected because Nokogiri decodes HTML entities during parsing before Loofah evaluates the URI protocol. This issue only affects direct callers of the `allowed_uri?` string-level helper when passing HTML-encoded strings.
Impact
Applications that call `Loofah::HTML5::Scrub.allowed_uri?` to validate user-controlled URLs and then render approved URLs into `href` or other browser-interpreted URI attributes may be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS).
This only affects Loofah `2.25.0`.
Mitigation
Upgrade to Loofah >= `2.25.1`.
Credit
Responsibly reported by HackOne user @smlee.
Related
References
- https://github.com/flavorjones/loofah/security/advisories/GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m web
- https://github.com/flavorjones/loofah/commit/f4ebc9c5193dde759a57541062e490e86fc7c068 web
- https://github.com/flavorjones/loofah package
- https://github.com/flavorjones/loofah/releases/tag/v2.25.1 web
- https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db/blob/master/gems/loofah/GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m.yml web