The security landscape for web applications is continually evolving, necessitating timely and effective updates to mitigate potential threats. Recently, a series of vulnerabilities were identified and addressed in Rack, a popular modular Ruby web server interface. These vulnerabilities, if exploited, could lead to denial of service (DoS) attacks, affecting the performance and reliability of web applications built on Ruby, including those running on Rails.
The first vulnerability, CVE-2024-25126, involves the misuse of media type headers. Attackers cleverly crafting these headers could trigger excessive processing times by Rack’s media type parser, leading to a potential ReDos attack of 2nd degree polynomial nature. Fortunately, this issue has been rectified in the latest versions, 3.0.9.1 and 2.2.8.1.
Another critical issue, CVE-2024-26141, was discovered where specifically crafted Range headers caused the server to generate unexpectedly large responses. This misconfiguration could overwhelm servers, leading to a denial of service. The affected components were primarily applications utilizing the `Rack::File` middleware or the `Rack::Utils.byte_ranges` methods. The resolution for this vulnerability has also been implemented in versions 3.0.9.1 and 2.2.8.1.
The third vulnerability, CVE-2024-26146, is related to an overload issue caused by specific headers. Faulty parsing of Accept and Forwarded headers in Rack could significantly delay server response times, facilitating DoS attacks. The good news is that Ruby 3.2 includes built-in mitigations for this issue, safeguarding Rack applications using this or newer versions. Patches for older versions have been released as well, specifically in 2.0.9.4, 2.1.4.4, 2.2.8.1, and 3.0.9.1.
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