TI-2022-07575 Aliases CVE-2022-23516 GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm

Uncontrolled Recursion in Loofah

MEDIUM 41CWE-674Published 2022-12-14 · Updated 2025-11-03

Key facts

Attack vector: Network
Privileges required: None
User interaction: None
Attack complexity: Low
Impact type: Denial of service
Confidentiality · integrity · availability: None · None · High
Fix status: Partial Red Hat: 1 fixed, 2 without a fix

Attack profile from CVSS 3.1 · CNA. Fix status from CNA, GitHub and Red Hat. Impact type from CWE-674.

Summary

Loofah is a general library for manipulating and transforming HTML/XML documents and fragments, built on top of Nokogiri. Loofah >= 2.2.0, < 2.19.1 uses recursion for sanitizing CDATA sections, making it susceptible to stack exhaustion and raising a SystemStackError exception. This may lead to a denial of service through CPU resource consumption. This issue is patched in version 2.19.1. Users who are unable to upgrade may be able to mitigate this vulnerability by limiting the length of the strings that are sanitized.

Why it matters now

Exploitation None reported CISA SSVC · not in CISA KEV

EPSS 0.01167 67th percentileScored 2026-11-07

Fix Partial loofah (flavorjones): 2.19.1loofah (RubyGems): 2.19.1Red Hat: 1 advisoryRed Hat: 1 fixed, 2 without a fix

SSVC decision points

CISA ADP · SSVC 2.0.3

Exploitation: None
Automatable: Yes
Technical impact: Partial

The decision (Track, Attend, Act) also depends on your mission and well-being impact; see CISA's SSVC guide.

Affected products

Vendor	Product	Affected versions	Fixed in	Status	Source
flavorjones	loofah	2.2.0 to before 2.19.1	2.19.1	Patch available	CNA
—	loofah (RubyGems)	2.2.0 to before 2.19.1	2.19.1	Patch available	GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm

loofah Vendorflavorjones Affected 2.2.0 to before 2.19.1 Fixed in 2.19.1 Patch available CNA
loofah (RubyGems) Vendor— Affected 2.2.0 to before 2.19.1 Fixed in 2.19.1 Patch available GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm

CPE configurations NVD · 1

CPE	Versions	Role	Vendor
cpe:2.3:a:loofah_project:loofah::::::ruby::*	2.2.0 to before 2.19.1	Vulnerable	flavorjones

cpe:2.3:a:loofah_project:loofah:*:*:*:*:*:ruby:*:* Versions 2.2.0 to before 2.19.1 Vulnerable ·flavorjones

Remediation

Fix · CNA loofah (flavorjones) Fixed in 2.19.1
Fix · GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm loofah (RubyGems) Fixed in 2.19.1 Advisory →

Red Hat 1 advisory

RHSA-2023:2097 Released 2023-05-03 · Red Hat rating Important
Satellite 6.13 Release
- Red Hat Satellite 6.13 for RHEL 8 ansible-collection-redhat-satellite-3.9.0-2.el8sat, ansible-collection-redhat-satellite_operations-1.3.0-2.el8sat, ansible-lint-5.0.8-4.el8pc +47

Vendor assessments

Red Hat

Red Hat rating: Moderate. Red Hat's page for this CVE →

Product	Status	Plan or fix
Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform 2	Affected	No fix planned: Will not fix
Red Hat Satellite 6	Affected	No fix yet
Red Hat Satellite 6.13 for RHEL 8	Fixed	RHSA-2023:2097

Not affected: 1 product

Red Hat Satellite 6.13 for RHEL 8

Timeline

2026-10-02 Threatist record created from CVE-2022-23516
2026-10-03 Alias added: GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm

References

Advisory 2

Other 5

TI-2022-07573 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in Loofah CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.5
TI-2018-05825 In the Loofah gem through 2.2.0 for Ruby, non-whitelisted HTML attributes may occur in… CVSS 3.0MEDIUM 6.1
TI-2022-07577 Improper neutralization of data URIs allows XSS in rails-html-sanitizer CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 6.1
TI-2022-07574 Improper neutralization of data URIs may allow XSS in Loofah CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 6.1
TI-2019-11687 Cross-site scripting in Loofah CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.4
TI-2018-11810 Cross-site scripting in Loofah CVSS 3.0MEDIUM 5.4

Sources

This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Sources and licences