Nokogiri update packaged libxml2 to v2.12.5 to resolve CVE-2024-25062

Summary

Nokogiri upgrades its dependency libxml2 as follows:

• Nokogiri v1.15.6 upgrades libxml2 to 2.11.7 from 2.11.6
• Nokogiri 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://vulners.com/cve/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.

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.

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.

Timeline

• 2024-02-04 10:35 EST - this GHSA is drafted without complete details about when the upstream issue was introduced; a request is made of libxml2 maintainers for more detailed information
• 2024-02-04 10:48 EST - updated GHSA to reflect libxml2 maintainers’ confirmation of affected versions
• 2024-02-04 11:54 EST - v1.16.2 published, this GHSA made public
• 2024-02-05 10:18 EST - updated with MITRE link to the CVE information, and updated “Impact” section
• 2024-03-16 09:03 EDT - v1.15.6 published (see discussion at https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/discussions/3146), updated mitigation information
• 2024-03-18 22:12 EDT - update “affected products” range with v1.15.6 information