GHSA-vcc3-rw6f-jv97

Duplicate Advisory: Use-after-free in libxml2 via Nokogiri::XML::Reader

Medium Withdrawn May 23, 2025 RubyGems

Severity: Medium; The publisher's own rating, not a CVSS score
Exploit chance (EPSS): —; No score published
Known exploited: No; Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness: CWE-416 Use After Free
Fix: 1.15.6; Upgrade nokogiri to this version or later

Description

Duplicate Advisory

This advisory has been withdrawn because it is a duplicate of GHSA-xc9x-jj77-9p9j. This link is maintained to preserve external references.

Original Description

Summary

Nokogiri upgrades its dependency libxml2 as follows:

v1.15.6 upgrades libxml2 to 2.11.7 from 2.11.6
v1.16.2 upgrades libxml2 to 2.12.5 from 2.12.4

libxml2 v2.11.7 and v2.12.5 address the following vulnerability:

CVE-2024-25062 / https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2024-25062

described at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/604
patched by https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/92721970

Please note that this advisory only applies to the CRuby implementation of Nokogiri, and only if the packaged libraries are being used. If you've overridden defaults at installation time to use system libraries instead of packaged libraries, you should instead pay attention to your distro's libxml2 release announcements.

JRuby users are not affected.

Severity

The Nokogiri maintainers have evaluated this as Moderate.

Impact

From the CVE description, this issue applies to the xmlTextReader module (which underlies Nokogiri::XML::Reader):

When using the XML Reader interface with DTD validation and XInclude expansion enabled, processing crafted XML documents can lead to an xmlValidatePopElement use-after-free.

Mitigation

Upgrade to Nokogiri ~> 1.15.6 or >= 1.16.2.

Users who are unable to upgrade Nokogiri may also choose a more complicated mitigation: compile and link Nokogiri against patched external libxml2 libraries which will also address these same issues.

Affected versions

RubyGems

Package	Vulnerable	Fixed in
nokogiri	`< 1.15.6`	`1.15.6`
nokogiri	`>= 1.16.0, < 1.16.2`	`1.16.2`

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

nokogiri RubyGems → `1.15.6`

bundler

bundle update nokogiri # Gemfile: gem "nokogiri", ">= 1.15.6"

Weakness

CWE-416: Use After Free

The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design: Choose a language that provides automatic memory management.
Implementation: When freeing pointers, be sure to set them to NULL once they are freed. However, the utilization of multiple or complex data structures may lower the usefulness of this strategy.

References

Packages

github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri

Timeline

Mar 18, 2024 Published
May 23, 2025 Withdrawn
May 23, 2025 Last updated by the source

Advisory	Severity	Why it's related
GHSA-phwj-rprq-35pp Nokogiri: Possible Use-After-Free when setting an attribute value via `Nokogiri::XML::Attr#value=` or `#content=`	High	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-wfpw-mmfh-qq69 Nokogiri: Possible Use-After-Free in XInclude Processing	Low	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-p67v-3w7g-wjg7 Nokogiri: Possible Use-After-Free when directly using `NokogirI::XML::XPathContext` beyond document lifetime	Medium	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-wjv4-x9w8-wm3h Nokogiri: Possible Use-After-Free when setting `Document#root=` to an invalid node type	Medium	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-5prr-v3j2-97mh Nokogiri: Possible Out-of-Bounds Read in `Nokogiri::XML::NodeSet#[]`	High	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-9cv2-cfxc-v4v2 Nokogiri: Null Pointer Dereference calling methods on uninitialized wrapper classes	High	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-8678-w3jw-xfc2 Nokogiri: XML::Schema on JRuby allows network requests when NONET is set, bypassing CVE-2020-26247	Low	Also affects nokogiri
GHSA-5v8h-3h3q-446p Nokogiri: Possible Use-After-Free when `Nokogiri::XML::Document#encoding=` raises an exception	High	Also affects nokogiri

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