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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.3 CVE-2026-126205 EUVD-2026-124678GHSA-mf2j-8f84-cc9q

Loofah: Regular expression denial of service in the SVG local-reference check

Published Nov 12, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Loofah is a general library for manipulating and transforming HTML/XML documents and fragments, built on top of Nokogiri. Prior to 2.25.3, the Loofah HTML5 sanitizer checks href and xlink:href on elements in SVG_ALLOW_LOCAL_HREF with a regular expression whose line anchor and newline-matching whitespace cause an all-whitespace value to be rescanned from every line start. An attacker can submit an SVG reference element with a long multiline-whitespace attribute and consume CPU quadratically during sanitization. CRuby 3.1 and earlier and JRuby are affected, while CRuby 3.2 and later uses linear-time regular-expression matching. The default safelist reaches the vulnerable check without a configuration change. This issue is fixed in version 2.25.3.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
flavorjones loofah < 2.25.3 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 ruby-loofah No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ruby-loofah No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ruby-loofah No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ruby-loofah No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ruby-loofah No fix yet —
Show 2 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ruby-loofah No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ruby-loofah No fix yet —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
RubyGems loofah < 2.25.3 2.25.3 GHSA-mf2j-8f84-cc9q

References