Action View is a framework for handling view template lookup and rendering and provides view helpers for building HTML. Prior to 8.1.4.1 and 8.0.5.2, with the HTML5 sanitizer (Rails::HTML5::Sanitizer, the default vendor on CRuby for applications using load_defaults 7.1 or later), Nokogiri before 1.19.5 serializes < and > unescaped inside attribute values. The Action View text helpers highlight and simple_format sanitize their input and then process the resulting HTML as a string: highlight splits it on tag boundaries to insert matches, and simple_format splits it into paragraphs on blank lines. An unescaped > or a blank line inside an attribute value could cause markup in that value, which the sanitizer left inert, to be emitted as live elements in the helper's html_safe output, possibly leading to XSS. Applications that use the HTML5 sanitizer and pass untrusted text to highlight, or to simple_format with html_options, are affected. This issue is fixed in versions 8.1.4.1 and 8.0.5.2.