Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting org.jruby:jruby package, versions [3.1.0,3.1.12)[3.2.0,3.2.13)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
1.28% (87th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications

Snyk Learn

Learn about Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities in an interactive lesson.

Start learning
  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-ORGJRUBY-30134
  • published18 Mar 2013
  • disclosed18 Mar 2013
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 18 Mar 2013

CVE-2013-1856  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade activesupport to versions 2.3.0, 3.1.12, 3.2.13 or higher.

Overview

activesupport is toolkit of support libraries and Ruby core extensions extracted from the Rails framework

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (Dos) attacks. 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 may allow for various denial of service attacks.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

version 3.1