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.

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

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.