Overview

rack is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Output Neutralization for Logs in the Rack::Sendfile middleware which logs values from the X-Sendfile-Type header. An attacker can inject messages into logs by including escape sequences such as newline characters in sent headers.

Remediation

Upgrade rack to version 2.2.12, 3.0.13, 3.1.11 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit

Overview

rack is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Web Cache Poisoning by using a vector called parameter cloaking. When the attacker can separate query parameters using a semicolon (;), they can cause a difference in the interpretation of the request between the proxy (running with default configuration) and the server. This can result in malicious requests being cached as completely safe ones, as the proxy would usually not see the semicolon as a separator, and therefore would not include it in a cache key of an unkeyed parameter.

PoC

GET /?q=legitimate&utm_content=1;q=malicious HTTP/1.1

Host: somesite.com

Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1		

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.83 Safari/537.36

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,imag e/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate			

Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9 Connection: close			

The server sees 3 parameters here: q, utm_content and then q again. On the other hand, the proxy considers this full string: 1;q=malicious as the value of utm_content, which is why the cache key would only contain somesite.com/?q=legitimate.

Remediation

Upgrade rack to version 3.0.0.beta1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• Web Cache Poisoning - Snyk Research Blog

Overview

rack is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the build_nested_query() function, used when parsing Accept and Forwarded headers. This can cause parsing performance to slow down.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade rack to version 2.0.9.4, 2.1.4.4, 2.2.8.1, 3.0.9.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release
• Vulnerability Advisory

Overview

rack is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when parsing Content-Type data in media_type.rb, causing a slow-down in parsing performance. Code using any of the following may be vulnerable: request.media_type, request.media_type_params, Rack::MediaType.type(content_type)

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade rack to version 2.2.8.1, 3.0.9.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release
• Vulnerability Advisory

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Reliance on Untrusted Inputs in a Security Decision via the X-Forwarded-Host (XFH) header. When making a request to a method with redirect applied, it is possible to trigger an Open Redirect Attack by inserting an arbitrary address into this header. If used for caching purposes, such as with servers like Nginx, or as a reverse proxy, without handling the X-Forwarded-Host header, attackers can potentially exploit Cache Poisoning or Routing-based SSRF.

Remediation

Upgrade sinatra to version 4.1.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR (partial fix)
• Vulnerable Code
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

webrick is a HTTP server toolkit that can be configured as an HTTPS server, a proxy server, and a virtual-host server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to HTTP Request Smuggling when httprequest.rb processes a request with both Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding headers. An attacker can send a GET /admin inside a POST /user to trick the server into treating the second one as a legitimate request, exposing unintended data.

Note: The package maintainers instruct users not to use this package in production and that it is no longer part of the Ruby language although it was in the past.

PoC

POST /user HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:8000
Content-Length: 50
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

0

GET /admin HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:8000

Remediation

Upgrade webrick to version 1.8.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue