CVE-2026-33170 MEDIUM

CVE-2026-33170: Rails Active Support has a possible XSS vulnerability in SafeBuffer#%

Vendor Rails
Product activesupport
Weakness CWE-79 · XSS
Published March 23, 2026
Last update March 25, 2026

CVSS base score

5.3/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction
Confidentiality
Integrity

CVSS vector

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

What the vulnerability does

Description

Active Support is a toolkit of support libraries and Ruby core extensions extracted from the Rails framework. Prior to versions 8.1.2.1, 8.0.4.1, and 7.2.3.1, `SafeBuffer#%` does not propagate the `@html_unsafe` flag to the newly created buffer. If a `SafeBuffer` is mutated in place (e.g. via `gsub!`) and then formatted with `%` using untrusted arguments, the result incorrectly reports `html_safe? == true`, bypassing ERB auto-escaping and possibly leading to XSS. Versions 8.1.2.1, 8.0.4.1, and 7.2.3.1 contain a patch.

Key dates

Disclosure timeline

March 23, 2026 CVE published
March 25, 2026 Record updated