7.5

CVE-2022-23516: Uncontrolled Recursion in Loofah

Modified
AliasesUBUNTU-CVE-2022-23516DEBIAN-CVE-2022-23516GHSA-3x8r-x6xp-q4vm
Published 14-12-2022Last modified 03-11-2025

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2022-23516 is a high (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in flavorjones loofah. EPSS estimates a 1.17% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 67.3% of scored vulnerabilities.

Priority
Prioritisesevere

Severe, CVSS 7.5 (CVE.org); no exploitation reported by the 5 checked sources; EPSS 1% (FIRST, 03-11-2026)

Source freshness unavailable

How is this decided?
CVSS score
7.5/10
010
High · v3.1 (CVE.org)
EPSS score
1.17%
0%100%
Low · +0.04 pp in 30 days
KEVNot listedNot listed by any tracked catalog.
RansomwareNot flaggedNo ransomware use recorded.
Public exploits0No public exploits recorded

Advisory lineage

Upstream 0 · Downstream 8 · Related 5
DLA-3565-1DLA-3901-1OPENSUSE-SU-2024:12768-1OPENSUSE-SU-2024:14171-1OPENSUSE-SU-2025:15120-1OPENSUSE-SU-2026:10353-1

Timeline

  1. 14-12-2022
    PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
  2. 03-11-2025
    Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Loofah is a general library for manipulating and transforming HTML/XML documents and fragments, built on top of Nokogiri. Loofah >= 2.2.0, < 2.19.1 uses recursion for sanitizing CDATA sections, making it susceptible to stack exhaustion and raising a SystemStackError exception. This may lead to a denial of service through CPU resource consumption. This issue is patched in version 2.19.1. Users who are unable to upgrade may be able to mitigate this vulnerability by limiting the length of the strings that are sanitized.

CVSS metrics

5 scores · 5 sources · 1 version

EPSS trend

Probability

1.17%

Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days

Percentile

67%

Versus all other CVEs

30-day change

Increase +0.04 pp

From 1.13% on 04-10-2026

04-10-202603-11-2026

Known exploited

Compare KEV catalogs
CISA KEV

Not in the CISA KEV catalog.

ENISA CNW

Not in the ENISA CNW catalog.

CIRCL

Not in the CIRCL catalog.

Public exploits

0 found

No public exploits indexed.

Weaknesses

CWE · root cause

Affected systems

Version check

Known conditions: network-reachable, no authentication, no user interaction (CVSS vector). Other conditions: not stated in public data.

Debian1 product
  • ruby-loofah< 2.19.1-1
Flavorjones1 product
Loofah_project1 product
RubyGems1 product
  • loofah≥ 2.2.0, < 2.19.1
Ubuntu1 product
  • ruby-loofahAll versions (No fix recorded)

5 vendors · 5 products

References

10 links