Nokogiri gem, via libxml2, is affected by multiple vulnerabilities

Nokogiri 1.8.5 has been released.

This is a security and bugfix release. It addresses two CVEs in upstream
libxml2 rated as “medium” by Red Hat, for which details are below.

If you’re using your distro’s system libraries, rather than Nokogiri’s
vendored libraries, there’s no security need to upgrade at this time,
though you may want to check with your distro whether they’ve patched this
(Canonical has patched Ubuntu packages). Note that these patches are not
yet (as of 2018-10-04) in an upstream release of libxml2.

Full details about the security update are available in Github Issue #1785.
[#1785]: https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/issues/1785

[MRI] Pulled in upstream patches from libxml2 that address CVE-2018-14404
and CVE-2018-14567. Full details are available in #1785. Note that these
patches are not yet (as of 2018-10-04) in an upstream release of libxml2.

CVE-2018-14404

Permalink:

https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2018/CVE-2018-14404.html

Description:

A NULL pointer dereference vulnerability exists in the
xpath.c:xmlXPathCompOpEval() function of libxml2 through 2.9.8 when
parsing an invalid XPath expression in the XPATH_OP_AND or XPATH_OP_OR
case. Applications processing untrusted XSL format inputs with the use of
the libxml2 library may be vulnerable to a denial of service attack due
to a crash of the application

Canonical rates this vulnerability as “Priority: Medium”

CVE-2018-14567

Permalink:

https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2018/CVE-2018-14567.html

Description:

infinite loop in LZMA decompression

Canonical rates this vulnerability as “Priority: Medium”