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CVE-2022-23516 High

Uncontrolled Recursion in Loofah

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.

Exploit probability 1.1%
Published December 14, 2022
Required by Not available
Last source change August 12, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Unknown Unknown

22 explicit affected versions

RubyGems loofah

23 explicit affected versions

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities CVE-2022-23516

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.

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Open Source Vulnerabilities GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm

## Summary 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. ## Mitigation Upgrade to Loofah `>= 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. ## Severity The Loofah maintainers have evaluated this as [High Severity 7.5 (CVSS3.1)](https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/3.1#CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H). ## References - [CWE - CWE-674: Uncontrolled Recursion (4.9)](https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/674.html)

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05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence