CVE-2022-23520: Incomplete fix for CVE-2022-32209 (XSS in Rails::Html::Sanitizer under certain configurations)

How it was found

The following is from: https://hackerone.com/reports/1654310

While building a PoC for CVE-2022-32209, I noticed that I could not fix my vulnerable application by updating https://github.com/rails/rails-html-sanitizer from 1.4.2 to 1.4.3 even though the Hackerone report about this vulnerability suggested that this should fix it (see here: https://hackerone.com/reports/1530898).

I built this app with Rails 7.0.3.1 by just running "rails new", adding config.action_view.sanitized_allowed_tags = ["select", "style"] to the file config/application.rb and creating an endpoint that reflected a parameter after sanitizing it (ERB: <p>Hello <%= sanitize @name %></p>). When using the payload <select><style><script>alert("XSS")</script></style></select> for the parameter I got an alert no matter what the version of rails-html-sanitizer was.

I believe the reason is the following. There are two ways you can pass the list of allowed tags to the sanitizer. One is via a list of tags stored in a class attribute, the other is via an argument passed into the sanitize method. The fix only considered the second way but the first one was forgotten. See the commit with the fix here: https://github.com/rails/rails-html-sanitizer/commit/c871aa4034d3d80ad67cf33a3462154b0a0fb477#diff-0daf33b9062eb5ccdeae86ed8bf2662a6e8669f1a7db590802b7f3b36ea47426R159 The relevant part of the code is this:

module Rails
  module Html
    class SafeListSanitizer < Sanitizer
      ...
      def remove_safelist_tag_combinations(tags)
        if !loofah_using_html5? && tags.include?("select") && tags.include?("style")
          warn("WARNING: #{self.class}: removing 'style' from safelist, should not be combined with 'select'")
          tags.delete("style")
        end
        tags
      end

      def allowed_tags(options)
        if options[:tags]
          remove_safelist_tag_combinations(options[:tags])
        else
          self.class.allowed_tags
        end
      end
      ...
    end
  end
end

Method remove_safelist_tag_combinations is introduced to remove style from the allow list if select is in there. However, within method allowed_tags this cleanup is only applied to the tag list in the options, not to self.class.allowed_tags, the list stored in the sanitizer class. However, it seems that the configuration in config/application.rb which I've set above put the list into the class variable (I've sprinkled a few puts here and there to confirm that).

Moreover, when moving the allow list from config/application.rb into the ERB template (<p>Hello <%= sanitize @name, tags: ["select", "style"] %></p>), the update from 1.4.2 to 1.4.3 does fix the problem.

Impact

It is possible to bypass Rails::Html::SafeListSanitizer filtering and perform an XSS attack.