Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting rack package, versions <1.6.1, >=1.6.0.beta<1.5.3, >=1.5.0

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) attacks. It copied the okjson.rb file from the sentry-ruby gem, which contains the numtok function. When supplying a large exponent value in a scientific number to that function, it causes a Denial of Service (DoS). With a specially crafted request, an attacker can cause the software to excessively consume resources, and deny service to any other client.

This is related to SNYK-RUBY-SENTRYRAVEN-20202

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

• Github Release Notes
• CVE in Raven-ruby
• Github Commit