6.1 Medium
CVSS3
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
REQUIRED
Scope
CHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
LOW
Integrity Impact
LOW
Availability Impact
NONE
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
0.001 Low
EPSS
Percentile
21.4%
Pages that are indexed in search results have their entire contents indexed, including any HTML code snippets. These HTML snippets would appear in the search results unsanitised, so it was possible to render arbitrary HTML or run arbitrary scripts.
This is a low risk security issue; to exploit it, an attacker would need to find a way of committing malicious code to a page indexed by a site that uses tech-docs-gem (which are typically not editable by untrusted users). Their code would also be limited by the relatively short length that’s rendered in the corresponding search result. Nevertheless, the XSS would then be triggerable by visiting a pre-constructed URL (/search/index.html?q=some+search+term), which users could be tricked into clicking on through social engineering.
This has been fixed in v3.3.1. HTML is now sanitised in search results.
github.com/alphagov/tech-docs-gem
github.com/alphagov/tech-docs-gem/commit/a51c7058cec46bf2a4e25a1da62b14ac3fd46b53
github.com/alphagov/tech-docs-gem/pull/323
github.com/alphagov/tech-docs-gem/releases/tag/v3.3.1
github.com/alphagov/tech-docs-gem/security/advisories/GHSA-x2xw-hw8g-6773
github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db/blob/master/gems/govuk_tech_docs/CVE-2024-22048.yml
nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-22048