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 html_safe after they have been sanitized. When these strings are mutated, the tag is should be removed to mark them as no longer being html_safe.

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.

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.

When a Hash containing user-controlled data is encode as JSON (either through Hash#to_json or ActiveSupport::JSON.encode), Rails does not perform adequate escaping that matches the guarantee implied by the escape_html_entities_in_json option (which is enabled by default). If this resulting JSON string is subsequently inserted directly into an HTML page, the page will be vulnerable to XSS attacks.

For example, the following code snippet is vulnerable to this attack:

<%= javascript_tag "var data = #{user_supplied_data.to_json};" %>

Similarly, the following is also vulnerable:

<script>
  var data = <%= ActiveSupport::JSON.encode(user_supplied_data).html_safe %>;
</script>

All applications that renders JSON-encoded strings that contains user-controlled data in their views should either upgrade to one of the FIXED versions or use the suggested workaround immediately.

Workarounds

To work around this problem add an initializer with the following code:

module ActiveSupport module JSON module Encoding private class EscapedString def to_s self end end end end end