CVE-2015-7579 (published 2016-02-16T02:59Z)

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the rails-html-sanitizer gem 1.0.2 for Ruby on Rails 4.2.x and 5.x allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via an HTML entity that is mishandled by the Rails::Html::FullSanitizer class.

Severity: MEDIUM
CVSS v2 base score: 4.3 (AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N)
CVSS v3 base score: 6.1, MEDIUM (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N)

Weakness information:
cwe_id: CWE-79
cwe_name: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
description: The product does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes user-controllable input before it is placed in output that is used as a web page that is served to other users.
extended_description: 
            Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities occur when:
            
               Untrusted data enters a web application, typically from a web request.
               The web application dynamically generates a web page that contains this untrusted data.
               During page generation, the application does not prevent the data from containing content that is executable by a web browser, such as JavaScript, HTML tags, HTML attributes, mouse events, Flash, ActiveX, etc.
               A victim visits the generated web page through a web browser, which contains malicious script that was injected using the untrusted data.
               Since the script comes from a web page that was sent by the web server, the victim's web browser executes the malicious script in the context of the web server's domain.
               This effectively violates the intention of the web browser's same-origin policy, which states that scripts in one domain should not be able to access resources or run code in a different domain.
            
            There are three main kinds of XSS:
            
               
                  Type 1: Reflected XSS (or Non-Persistent) - 
         			The server reads data directly from the HTTP request and reflects it back in the HTTP response. Reflected XSS exploits occur when an attacker causes a victim to supply dangerous content to a vulnerable web application, which is then reflected back to the victim and executed by the web browser. The most common mechanism for delivering malicious content is to include it as a parameter in a URL that is posted publicly or e-mailed directly to the victim. URLs constructed in this manner constitute the core of many phishing schemes, whereby an attacker convinces a victim to visit a URL that refers to a vulnerable site. After the site reflects the attacker's content back to the victim, the content is executed by the victim's browser.
               
                  Type 2: Stored XSS (or Persistent) - 
               The application stores dangerous data in a database, message forum, visitor log, or other trusted data store. At a later time, the dangerous data is subsequently read back into the application and included in dynamic content. From an attacker's perspective, the optimal place to inject malicious content is in an area that is displayed to either many users or particularly interesting users. Interesting users typically have elevated privileges in the application or interact with sensitive data that is valuable to the attacker. If one of these users executes malicious content, the attacker may be able to perform privileged operations on behalf of the user or gain access to sensitive data belonging to the user. For example, the attacker might inject XSS into a log message, which might not be handled properly when an administrator views the logs.
            
               
                  Type 0: DOM-Based XSS - 
               In DOM-based XSS, the client performs the injection of XSS into the page; in the other types, the server performs the injection. DOM-based XSS generally involves server-controlled, trusted script that is sent to the client, such as Javascript that performs sanity checks on a form before the user submits it. If the server-supplied script processes user-supplied data and then injects it back into the web page (such as with dynamic HTML), then DOM-based XSS is possible.
            
            
            Once the malicious script is injected, the attacker can perform a variety of malicious activities. The attacker could transfer private information, such as cookies that may include session information, from the victim's machine to the attacker. The attacker could send malicious requests to a web site on behalf of the victim, which could be especially dangerous to the site if the victim has administrator privileges to manage that site. Phishing attacks could be used to emulate trusted web sites and trick the victim into entering a password, allowing the attacker to compromise the victim's account on that web site. Finally, the script could exploit a vulnerability in the web browser itself possibly taking over the victim's machine, sometimes referred to as "drive-by hacking."
            In many cases, the attack can be launched without the victim even being aware of it. Even with careful users, attackers frequently use a variety of methods to encode the malicious portion of the attack, such as URL encoding or Unicode, so the request looks less suspicious.
         
         

Fix information:
repo_url: https://github.com/rails/rails-html-sanitizer
commit_details: repo_url: https://github.com/rails/rails-html-sanitizer
author: Rafael Mendonça França
author_date: 2015-08-10 16:22:15-03:00
msg: Do not unescape already escaped HTML entities

The full sanitizer was using Loofah's #text method that automatically
escapes HTML entities. That behavior caused some problems where strings
that were not escaped in the older sanitizer started to be escaped. To
fix these problems we used the #text's `encode_special_chars` option as
`false` that not just skipped the HTML entities escaping but unescaped
already escaped entities.

This introduced a security bug because an attacker can pass escaped HTML
tags that will not be sanitized and will be returned as unescaped HTML
tags.

To fix it properly we introduced a new scrubber that will remove all
tags and keep just the text nodes of these tags without changing how
to escape the string.

CVE-2015-7579
repository: repo_url: https://github.com/rails/rails-html-sanitizer
repo_name: rails/rails-html-sanitizer
repo_language: Ruby
owner: rails
file_changes: filename: sanitizer.rb
change_type: ModificationType.MODIFY
diff: @@ -13,6 +13,10 @@ module Rails
         node.xpath(*xpaths).remove
         node
       end
+
+      def properly_encode(fragment, options)
+        fragment.xml? ? fragment.to_xml(options) : fragment.to_html(options)
+      end
     end
 
     # === Rails::Html::FullSanitizer
@@ -26,9 +30,12 @@ module Rails
         return unless html
         return html if html.empty?
 
-        Loofah.fragment(html).tap do |fragment|
-          remove_xpaths(fragment, XPATHS_TO_REMOVE)
-        end.text(options)
+        loofah_fragment = Loofah.fragment(html)
+
+        remove_xpaths(loofah_fragment, XPATHS_TO_REMOVE)
+        loofah_fragment.scrub!(TextOnlyScrubber.new)
+
+        properly_encode(loofah_fragment, encoding: 'UTF-8')
       end
     end
 
@@ -140,10 +147,6 @@ module Rails
       def allowed_attributes(options)
         options[:attributes] || self.class.allowed_attributes
       end
-
-      def properly_encode(fragment, options)
-        fragment.xml? ? fragment.to_xml(options) : fragment.to_html(options)
-      end
     end
   end
 end

programming_language: Ruby
filename: scrubbers.rb
change_type: ModificationType.MODIFY
diff: @@ -169,5 +169,25 @@ module Rails
         !super
       end
     end
+
+    # === Rails::Html::TextOnlyScrubber
+    #
+    # Rails::Html::TextOnlyScrubber allows you to permit text nodes.
+    #
+    # Unallowed elements will be stripped, i.e. element is removed but its subtree kept.
+    class TextOnlyScrubber < Loofah::Scrubber
+      def initialize
+        @direction = :bottom_up
+      end
+
+      def scrub(node)
+        if node.text?
+          CONTINUE
+        else
+          node.before node.children
+          node.remove
+        end
+      end
+    end
   end
 end

programming_language: Ruby
filename: sanitizer_test.rb
change_type: ModificationType.MODIFY
diff: @@ -104,9 +104,12 @@ class SanitizersTest < Minitest::Test
     assert_equal "Frozen string with no tags", full_sanitize("Frozen string with no tags".freeze)
   end
 
-  def test_full_sanitize_allows_turning_off_encoding_special_chars
+  def test_full_sanitize_respect_html_escaping_of_the_given_string
+    assert_equal 'test\r\nstring', full_sanitize('test\r\nstring')
     assert_equal '&amp;', full_sanitize('&')
-    assert_equal '&', full_sanitize('&', encode_special_chars: false)
+    assert_equal '&amp;', full_sanitize('&amp;')
+    assert_equal '&amp;amp;', full_sanitize('&amp;amp;')
+    assert_equal 'omg &lt;script&gt;BOM&lt;/script&gt;', full_sanitize('omg &lt;script&gt;BOM&lt;/script&gt;')
   end
 
   def test_strip_links_with_tags_in_tags

programming_language: Ruby
filename: scrubbers_test.rb
change_type: ModificationType.MODIFY
diff: @@ -143,6 +143,20 @@ class TargetScrubberTest < ScrubberTest
   end
 end
 
+class TextOnlyScrubberTest < ScrubberTest
+  def setup
+    @scrubber = Rails::Html::TextOnlyScrubber.new
+  end
+
+  def test_removes_all_tags_and_keep_the_content
+    assert_scrubbed '<tag>hello</tag>', 'hello'
+  end
+
+  def test_skips_text_nodes
+    assert_node_skipped('some text')
+  end
+end
+
 class ReturningStopFromScrubNodeTest < ScrubberTest
   class ScrubStopper < Rails::Html::PermitScrubber
     def scrub_node(node)
@@ -157,4 +171,4 @@ class ReturningStopFromScrubNodeTest < ScrubberTest
   def test_returns_stop_from_scrub_if_scrub_node_does
     assert_scrub_stopped '<script>remove me</script>'
   end
-end
\ No newline at end of file
+end

programming_language: Ruby