Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting rack package, versions <1.3.0.beta


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RUBY-RACK-20397
  • published2 Aug 2017
  • disclosed29 Apr 2011
  • creditmcommons

Introduced: 29 Apr 2011

CVE NOT AVAILABLE CWE-835  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade rack to version 1.3.0.beta or higher.

Overview

rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby.

Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). If an attacker sent a malformed or malicious HTTP request, containing \n instead of \r\n , it could cause an infinite loop.

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

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