Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting rack package, versions >=1.2, <2.0.9.1 >=2.1.0, <2.1.4.1 >=2.2.0, <2.2.3.1

rack is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) via the multipart parsing component. Exploiting this vulnerability is possible when carefully crafted multipart POST requests cause Rack's multipart parser to take much longer than expected.

Notes:

Impacted code will use Rack's multipart parser to parse multipart posts. This includes directly using the multipart parser like this:

params = Rack::Multipart.parse_multipart(env)

It also includes reading POST data from a Rack request object like this:

p request.POST # read POST data 

p request.params # reads both query params and POST data

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

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