There is an unsafe object creation vulnerability in the json gem bundled with Ruby. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2020-10663. We strongly recommend upgrading the json gem.

Details

When parsing certain JSON documents, the json gem (including the one bundled with Ruby) can be coerced into creating arbitrary objects in the target system.

This is the same issue as CVE-2013-0269. The previous fix was incomplete, which addressed JSON.parse(user_input), but didn’t address some other styles of JSON parsing including JSON(user_input) and JSON.parse(user_input, nil).

See CVE-2013-0269 in detail. Note that the issue was exploitable to cause a Denial of Service by creating many garbage-uncollectable Symbol objects, but this kind of attack is no longer valid because Symbol objects are now garbage-collectable. However, creating arbitrary objects may cause severe security consequences depending upon the application code.

The JSON gem before 1.5.5, 1.6.x before 1.6.8, and 1.7.x before 1.7.7 for Ruby allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (resource consumption) or bypass the mass assignment protection mechanism via a crafted JSON document that triggers the creation of arbitrary Ruby symbols or certain internal objects, as demonstrated by conducting a SQL injection attack against Ruby on Rails, aka "Unsafe Object Creation Vulnerability."