activesupport Cross-site Scripting vulnerability

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/output_safety.rb in Ruby on Rails before 3.0.17, 3.1.x before 3.1.8, and 3.2.x before 3.2.8 might allow remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via vectors involving a ' (quote) character.

ReDoS based DoS vulnerability in Active Support's underscore

There is a possible regular expression based DoS vulnerability in Active Support. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-22796.

Versions Affected: All Not affected: None Fixed Versions: 5.2.8.15 (Rails LTS, which is a paid service and not part of the rubygem), 6.1.7.1, 7.0.4.1 Impact

A specially crafted string passed to the underscore method can cause the regular expression engine to enter a state of catastrophic backtracking. This can cause the process to use large amounts of CPU and memory, leading to a possible DoS vulnerability.

This affects String#underscore, ActiveSupport::Inflector.underscore, String#titleize, and any other methods using these.

All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately. Releases

The FIXED releases are available at the normal locations. Workarounds

There are no feasible workarounds for this issue.

Users on Ruby 3.2.0 or greater may be able to reduce the impact by configuring Regexp.timeout. Patches

To aid users who aren’t able to upgrade immediately we have provided patches for the two supported release series. They are in git-am format and consist of a single changeset.

6-1-Avoid-regex-backtracking-in-Inflector.underscore.patch - Patch for 6.1 series
7-0-Avoid-regex-backtracking-in-Inflector.underscore.patch - Patch for 7.0 series

Please note that only the 7.0.Z and 6.1.Z series are supported at present, and 6.0.Z for severe vulnerabilities. Users of earlier unsupported releases are advised to upgrade as soon as possible as we cannot guarantee the continued availability of security fixes for unsupported releases.

activesupport vulnerable to Denial of Service via large XML document depth

The (1) jdom.rb and (2) rexml.rb components in Active Support in Ruby on Rails before 4.1.11 and 4.2.x before 4.2.2, when JDOM or REXML is enabled, allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (SystemStackError) via a large XML document depth.

Possible XSS Security Vulnerability in SafeBuffer#bytesplice

There is a vulnerability in ActiveSupport if the new bytesplice method is called on a SafeBuffer with untrusted user input. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-28120.

Versions Affected: All. Not affected: None Fixed Versions: 7.0.4.3, 6.1.7.3

Impact

ActiveSupport uses the SafeBuffer string subclass to tag strings as htmlsafe after they have been sanitized. When these strings are mutated, the tag is should be removed to mark them as no longer being htmlsafe.

Ruby 3.2 introduced a new bytesplice method which ActiveSupport did not yet understand to be a mutation. Users on older versions of Ruby are likely unaffected.

All users running an affected release and using bytesplice should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.

Workarounds

Avoid calling bytesplice on a SafeBuffer (html_safe) string with untrusted user input.

Potential XSS Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails Applications

The cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention feature in Ruby on Rails 2.x before 2.3.12, 3.0.x before 3.0.8, and 3.1.x before 3.1.0.rc2 does not properly handle mutation of safe buffers, which makes it easier for remote attackers to conduct XSS attacks via crafted strings to an application that uses a problematic string method, as demonstrated by the sub method.

UTF-8 escaping vulnerability in rails/activesupport

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in activesupport/lib/activesupport/coreext/string/output_safety.rb in Ruby on Rails 2.x before 2.3.13, 3.0.x before 3.0.10, and 3.1.x before 3.1.0.rc5 allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via a malformed Unicode string, related to a UTF-8 escaping vulnerability.

CVE-2012-3464 rubygem-actionpack: potential XSS vulnerability

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in activesupport/lib/activesupport/coreext/string/output_safety.rb in Ruby on Rails before 3.0.17, 3.1.x before 3.1.8, and 3.2.x before 3.2.8 might allow remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via vectors involving a ' (quote) character.

CVE-2013-0333 rubygem-activesupport: json to yaml parsing

lib/active_support/json/backends/yaml.rb in Ruby on Rails 2.3.x before 2.3.16 and 3.0.x before 3.0.20 does not properly convert JSON data to YAML data for processing by a YAML parser, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, conduct SQL injection attacks, or bypass authentication via crafted data that triggers unsafe decoding, a different vulnerability than CVE-2013-0156.

XML Parsing Vulnerability affecting JRuby users

The ActiveSupport XML parsing functionality supports multiple pluggable backends. One backend supported for JRuby users is ActiveSupport::XmlMini_JDOM which makes use of the javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder class. In some JVM configurations the default settings of that class can allow an attacker to construct XML which, when parsed, will contain the contents of arbitrary URLs including files from the application server. They may also allow for various denial of service attacks. Action Pack

Possible Denial of Service attack in Active Support

Specially crafted XML documents can cause applications to raise a SystemStackError and potentially cause a denial of service attack. This only impacts applications using REXML or JDOM as their XML processor. Other XML processors that Rails supports are not impacted.

All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the work arounds immediately.

Workarounds

Use an XML parser that is not impacted by this problem, such as Nokogiri or LibXML. You can change the processor like this:

ActiveSupport::XmlMini.backend = 'Nokogiri'

If you cannot change XML parsers, then adjust RUBY_THREAD_MACHINE_STACK_SIZE.

Potentially unintended unmarshalling of user-provided objects in MemCacheStore and RedisCacheStore

There is potentially unexpected behaviour in the MemCacheStore and RedisCacheStore where, when untrusted user input is written to the cache store using the raw: true parameter, re-reading the result from the cache can evaluate the user input as a Marshalled object instead of plain text. Vulnerable code looks like:

data = cache.fetch("demo", raw: true) { untrusted_string }

Versions Affected: rails < 5.2.5, rails < 6.0.4 Not affected: Applications not using MemCacheStore or RedisCacheStore. Applications that do not use the raw option when storing untrusted user input. Fixed Versions: rails >= 5.2.4.3, rails >= 6.0.3.1

Impact

Unmarshalling of untrusted user input can have impact up to and including RCE. At a minimum, this vulnerability allows an attacker to inject untrusted Ruby objects into a web application.

In addition to upgrading to the latest versions of Rails, developers should ensure that whenever they are calling Rails.cache.fetch they are using consistent values of the raw parameter for both reading and writing, especially in the case of the RedisCacheStore which does not, prior to these changes, detect if data was serialized using the raw option upon deserialization.

Workarounds

It is recommended that application developers apply the suggested patch or upgrade to the latest release as soon as possible. If this is not possible, we recommend ensuring that all user-provided strings cached using the raw argument should be double-checked to ensure that they conform to the expected format.

ReDoS based DoS vulnerability in Active Support’s underscore

There is a possible regular expression based DoS vulnerability in Active Support. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-22796.

Versions Affected: All Not affected: None Fixed Versions: 5.2.8.15 (Rails LTS), 6.1.7.1, 7.0.4.1

Impact

A specially crafted string passed to the underscore method can cause the regular expression engine to enter a state of catastrophic backtracking. This can cause the process to use large amounts of CPU and memory, leading to a possible DoS vulnerability.

This affects String#underscore, ActiveSupport::Inflector.underscore, String#titleize, and any other methods using these.

All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.

Workarounds

There are no feasible workarounds for this issue.

Users on Ruby 3.2.0 or greater may be able to reduce the impact by configuring Regexp.timeout.

Possible XSS Security Vulnerability in SafeBuffer#bytesplice

There is a vulnerability in ActiveSupport if the new bytesplice method is called on a SafeBuffer with untrusted user input. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-28120.

Versions Affected: All. Not affected: None Fixed Versions: 7.0.4.3, 6.1.7.3

Impact

ActiveSupport uses the SafeBuffer string subclass to tag strings as htmlsafe after they have been sanitized. When these strings are mutated, the tag is should be removed to mark them as no longer being htmlsafe.

Ruby 3.2 introduced a new bytesplice method which ActiveSupport did not yet understand to be a mutation. Users on older versions of Ruby are likely unaffected.

All users running an affected release and using bytesplice should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.

Workarounds

Avoid calling bytesplice on a SafeBuffer (html_safe) string with untrusted user input.