Answer in brief
CVE-2026-57438 records a Medium severity (CVSS 6.6) vulnerability in Nokogiri: Possible Use-After-Free in XInclude Processing. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. The current feed maps nokogiri (rubygems), nokogiri (rubygems). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
Analysis pending evidence review
HOL Guard separates source facts from reviewed analysis. See the methodology.
CVSS is 6.6. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. Treat this as a source-backed prioritization signal, not a statement about your environment.
Analysis status
Analysis pending evidence review
Factual feed record only; HOL analysis is not approved for indexing. Read the methodology.
The current feed maps nokogiri (rubygems), nokogiri (rubygems). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
| Package | Affected range | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| nokogirirubygems | <1.19.4 | 1.19.4 |
| nokogirirubygems | >=0 <1.19.4 | 1.19.4 |
Published upstream
Jun 19, 2026
Evidence: source:osv:source_dates:source-dates:recordSource modified
Sep 10, 2026
Evidence: source:osv:source_dates:source-dates:recordFirst seen by HOL
Jun 19, 2026
### Summary XInclude substitution performed by `Nokogiri::XML::Node#do_xinclude` replaced each `<xi:include>` in place, freeing the include node along with its children (such as `<xi:fallback>` and its descendants) and any namespaces declared on them. If an application had already exposed one of those nodes or namespaces to Ruby, the corresponding Ruby object was left pointing at freed memory. Using the object could result in invalid reads or writes to memory. Nokogiri 1.19.4 substitutes each `<xi:include>` on a defensive copy by default, so the structures libxml2 frees are never the ones bound to live Ruby objects. Only the CRuby implementation is affected; JRuby is not affected. ### Severity The Nokogiri maintainers have evaluated this as low severity. Reaching it requires an unusual API-usage pattern that does not arise during normal use. The application must parse a document without XInclude, traverse into an `<xi:include>` subtree to expose its nodes or namespaces to Ruby, and only then invoke XInclude processing. The common case, requesting XInclude at parse time, operates on a freshly parsed document whose nodes are not yet exposed to Ruby and is not affected. Nokogiri 1.19.4 makes this pattern safe by default and requires no change to application code. ### Mitigation Upgrade to Nokogiri 1.19.4 or later. As a workaround for earlier versions, perform XInclude substitution at parse time (with the `xinclude` parse option) rather than calling `#do_xinclude` on a document that has already been traversed. A freshly parsed document has no nodes exposed to Ruby, so the substitution is safe. ### Credit This issue was responsibly reported by Zheng Yu from depthfirst.com.
Quoted source text, attributed separately from HOL analysis.