GHSA-wx95-c6cv-8532
ADVISORY - githubSummary
Summary
Nokogiri's CRuby extension fails to check the return value from xmlC14NExecute in the method Nokogiri::XML::Document#canonicalize and Nokogiri::XML::Node#canonicalize. When canonicalization fails, an empty string is returned instead of raising an exception. This incorrect return value may allow downstream libraries to accept invalid or incomplete canonicalized XML, which has been demonstrated to enable signature validation bypass in SAML libraries.
JRuby is not affected, as the Java implementation correctly raises RuntimeError on canonicalization failure.
Mitigation
Upgrade to Nokogiri >= 1.19.1.
Severity
The maintainers have assessed this as Medium severity. Nokogiri itself is a parsing library without a clear security boundary related to canonicalization, so the direct impact is that a method returns incorrect data on invalid input. However, this behavior was exploited in practice to bypass SAML signature validation in downstream libraries (see References).
Credit
This vulnerability was responsibly reported by HackerOne researcher d4d.
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Unchecked Return Value
GitHub
3.9
CVSS SCORE
5.3medium| Package | Type | OS Name | OS Version | Affected Ranges | Fix Versions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nokogiri | gem | - | - | >=1.5.1,<1.19.1 | 1.19.1 |
CVSS:3 Severity and metrics
The CVSS metrics represent different qualitative aspects of a vulnerability that impact the overall score, as defined by the CVSS Specification.
The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack, but the attack is limited at the protocol level to a logically adjacent topology. This can mean an attack must be launched from the same shared physical (e.g., Bluetooth or IEEE 802.11) or logical (e.g., local IP subnet) network, or from within a secure or otherwise limited administrative domain (e.g., MPLS, secure VPN to an administrative network zone). One example of an Adjacent attack would be an ARP (IPv4) or neighbor discovery (IPv6) flood leading to a denial of service on the local LAN segment (e.g., CVE-2013-6014).
Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success when attacking the vulnerable component.
The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files of the vulnerable system to carry out an attack.
The vulnerable system can be exploited without interaction from any user.
An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are either the same, or both are managed by the same security authority.
There is no loss of confidentiality.
Modification of data is possible, but the attacker does not have control over the consequence of a modification, or the amount of modification is limited. The data modification does not have a direct, serious impact on the impacted component.
There is no impact to availability within the impacted component.