CVE-2026-128068rails rails-html-sanitizer uncontrolled resource consumption
CVE-2026-128068 is a uncontrolled resource consumption in rails rails-html-sanitizer, rated medium (5.3 on CVSS 3.1).
Why this priority: Medium severity, with no exploitation signal.
Published · Updated · NVD status: Received
What it is
Requests can consume unbounded CPU, memory or connections and starve the service. A crafted string makes a regular expression run for a very long time.
How it is reached
An attacker can exploit it over the network, without an account, and nobody has to click anything.
What an attacker gains
The direct impact is limited: partial access to data or a partial outage. In practice, this kind of flaw lets an attacker exhaust CPU, memory or connections until the service stops answering.
Is it being exploited?
There is no public report of exploitation yet.
What to do
- Upgrade rails rails-html-sanitizer to 1.7.2 or later.
- Until it is patched, keep it off the internet or behind a VPN, allowlist or authenticating proxy.
Description from NVD
rails-html-sanitizer is responsible for sanitizing HTML fragments in Rails applications. From 1.0.3 through 1.7.1, Rails::HTML::PermitScrubber checks SVG href and xlink:href local references with a pattern whose line-start anchor and whitespace class cause an all-whitespace value to be rescanned from each line start. An attacker who supplies HTML can cause quadratic CPU consumption when an application customizes its allowed tags to include an SVG reference element such as use and permits href or xlink:href. The default allowed tag configuration is not affected. CRuby 3.2 and later uses linear-time regular expression matching for this pattern, while CRuby 3.1 and earlier and JRuby are affected. This issue is fixed in version 1.7.2.
What this means for your architecture.
A CVE names a product. Whether it matters depends on where that product sits in your systems: what reaches it, which trust boundary it guards and what it can reach once compromised. Veriom maps your components, their relationships and your trust boundaries from your code, cloud and delivery evidence, so you can see where a component like this sits. The radar itself does not look at your systems.
Components it touches
- Public entry points and shared services that must stay up. The flaw sits between untrusted traffic and shared capacity.
Trust boundaries in play
- Internet-facing entry points. No account is needed. Any instance reachable from outside your perimeter, through a load balancer, gateway, VPN or exposed admin port, is in scope.
- Between untrusted traffic and shared capacity. An attacker who crosses it can exhaust CPU, memory or connections until the service stops answering.
Questions to answer about your own systems
- Where does rails rails-html-sanitizer run in your systems, and at which version?
- Which of those instances can be reached from the internet or partner networks?
- What can it reach once compromised: which data stores, secrets and services?
Sources
- CVE records and CVSS scores from the NVD CVE API. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.
- Exploitation status from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
- Exploit likelihood from FIRST’s Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), refreshed daily.
- Explanations are written by Veriom from fixed templates over each record’s data, not by a person reviewing each CVE. Descriptions are quoted from the records as published.