Summary

When using the Rack::Session::Pool middleware, simultaneous rack requests can restore a deleted rack session, which allows the unauthenticated user to occupy that session.

Details

Rack session middleware prepares the session at the beginning of request, then saves is back to the store with possible changes applied by host rack application. This way the session becomes to be a subject of race conditions in general sense over concurrent rack requests.

Impact

When using the Rack::Session::Pool middleware, and provided the attacker can acquire a session cookie (already a major issue), the session may be restored if the attacker can trigger a long running request (within that same session) adjacent to the user logging out, in order to retain illicit access even after a user has attempted to logout.

Mitigation

• Update to the latest version of rack, or
• Ensure your application invalidates sessions atomically by marking them as logged out e.g., using a logged_out flag, instead of deleting them, and check this flag on every request to prevent reuse, or
• Implement a custom session store that tracks session invalidation timestamps and refuses to accept session data if the session was invalidated after the request began.

Related

As this code was moved to rack-session in Rack 3+, see https://github.com/rack/rack-session/security/advisories/GHSA-9j94-67jr-4cqj for the equivalent advisory in rack-session (affecting Rack 3+ only).

Summary

Rack::Sendfile can be exploited by crafting input that includes newline characters to manipulate log entries.

Details

The Rack::Sendfile middleware logs unsanitized header values from the X-Sendfile-Type header. An attacker can exploit this by injecting escape sequences (such as newline characters) into the header, resulting in log injection.

Impact

This vulnerability can distort log files, obscure attack traces, and complicate security auditing.

Mitigation

• Update to the latest version of Rack, or
• Remove usage of Rack::Sendfile.

Summary

Rack::CommonLogger can be exploited by crafting input that includes newline characters to manipulate log entries. The supplied proof-of-concept demonstrates injecting malicious content into logs.

Details

When a user provides the authorization credentials via Rack::Auth::Basic, if success, the username will be put in env['REMOTE_USER'] and later be used by Rack::CommonLogger for logging purposes.

The issue occurs when a server intentionally or unintentionally allows a user creation with the username contain CRLF and white space characters, or the server just want to log every login attempts. If an attacker enters a username with CRLF character, the logger will log the malicious username with CRLF characters into the logfile.

Impact

Attackers can break log formats or insert fraudulent entries, potentially obscuring real activity or injecting malicious data into log files.

Mitigation

• Update to the latest version of Rack.

There is a possible denial of service vulnerability in the content type parsing component of Rack. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-25126.

Versions Affected: >= 0.4 Not affected: < 0.4 Fixed Versions: 3.0.9.1, 2.2.8.1

Impact

Carefully crafted content type headers can cause Rack’s media type parser to take much longer than expected, leading to a possible denial of service vulnerability.

Impacted code will use Rack’s media type parser to parse content type headers. This code will look like below:

request.media_type

## OR
request.media_type_params

## OR
Rack::MediaType.type(content_type)

Some frameworks (including Rails) call this code internally, so upgrading is recommended!

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.

There's a possible information leak / session hijack vulnerability in Rack.

Attackers may be able to find and hijack sessions by using timing attacks targeting the session id. Session ids are usually stored and indexed in a database that uses some kind of scheme for speeding up lookups of that session id. By carefully measuring the amount of time it takes to look up a session, an attacker may be able to find a valid session id and hijack the session.

The session id itself may be generated randomly, but the way the session is indexed by the backing store does not use a secure comparison.

Impact:

The session id stored in a cookie is the same id that is used when querying the backing session storage engine. Most storage mechanisms (for example a database) use some sort of indexing in order to speed up the lookup of that id. By carefully timing requests and session lookup failures, an attacker may be able to perform a timing attack to determine an existing session id and hijack that session.

There is a possible vulnerability in Rack. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2018-16471.

Versions Affected: All. Not affected: None. Fixed Versions: 2.0.6, 1.6.11

Impact

There is a possible XSS vulnerability in Rack. Carefully crafted requests can impact the data returned by the scheme method on Rack::Request. Applications that expect the scheme to be limited to "http" or "https" and do not escape the return value could be vulnerable to an XSS attack.

Vulnerable code looks something like this:

<%= request.scheme.html_safe %>

Note that applications using the normal escaping mechanisms provided by Rails may not impacted, but applications that bypass the escaping mechanisms, or do not use them may be vulnerable.

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

Releases

The 2.0.6 and 1.6.11 releases are available at the normal locations.

Workarounds

The following monkey patch can be applied to work around this issue:

require "rack"
require "rack/request"

class Rack::Request
SCHEME_WHITELIST = %w(https http).freeze

def scheme
  if get_header(Rack::HTTPS) == 'on'
    'https'
  elsif get_header(HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SSL) == 'on'
    'https'
  elsif forwarded_scheme
    forwarded_scheme
  else
    get_header(Rack::RACK_URL_SCHEME)
  end
end

def forwarded_scheme
  scheme_headers = [
    get_header(HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SCHEME),
    get_header(HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO).to_s.split(',')[0]
  ]

  scheme_headers.each do |header|
    return header if SCHEME_WHITELIST.include?(header)
  end

  nil
end
end

Carefully crafted requests can cause a SystemStackError and potentially cause a denial of service attack.

All users running an affected release should upgrade.

Rack::Session::Cookie in Rack 1.5.x before 1.5.2, 1.4.x before 1.4.5, 1.3.x before 1.3.10, 1.2.x before 1.2.8, and 1.1.x before 1.1.6 allows remote attackers to guess the session cookie, gain privileges, and execute arbitrary code via a timing attack involving an HMAC comparison function that does not run in constant time.

rack/file.rb (Rack::File) in Rack 1.5.x before 1.5.2 and 1.4.x before 1.4.5 allows attackers to access arbitrary files outside the intended root directory via a crafted PATH_INFO environment variable, probably a directory traversal vulnerability that is remotely exploitable, aka "symlink path traversals."

Unspecified vulnerability in Rack::Auth::AbstractRequest in Rack 1.1.x before 1.1.5, 1.2.x before 1.2.7, 1.3.x before 1.3.9, and 1.4.x before 1.4.4 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via unknown vectors related to "symbolized arbitrary strings."

multipart/parser.rb in Rack 1.3.x before 1.3.8 and 1.4.x before 1.4.3 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and out-of-memory error) via a long string in a Multipart HTTP packet.

lib/rack/multipart.rb in Rack before 1.1.4, 1.2.x before 1.2.6, 1.3.x before 1.3.7, and 1.4.x before 1.4.2 uses an incorrect regular expression, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) via a crafted Content-Disposion header.