GHSA-8whx-365g-h9vv Loofah `allowed_uri?` does not detect `javascript:` URIs split by named whitespace character references

• RubyGems loofah: >= 2.25.0, < 2.25.2 → fixed in 2.25.2

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;` (tab) or `&NewLine;` (line feed). This is a bypass of the fix for GHSA-46fp-8f5p-pf2m, which handled the equivalent numeric character references (`&#9;`, `&#10;`, `&#13;`) 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&Tab;script:alert(1)` are therefore left intact, so the method does not recognize the `javascript:` scheme and returns `true`. A browser, however, decodes `&Tab;` and `&NewLine;` to tab and line feed and strips them from the URL during parsing, producing `javascript:alert(1)`. `&Tab;` and `&NewLine;` 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). `&nbsp;` / `&NonBreakingSpace;` 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.