An operating system command injection flaw was found in RDoc. Using the rdoc command to generate documentation for a malicious Ruby source code could lead to execution of arbitrary commands with the privileges of the user running rdoc.
An issue was discovered in Ruby through 2.5.8, 2.6.x through 2.6.6, and 2.7.x through 2.7.1. WEBrick, a simple HTTP server bundled with Ruby, had not checked the transfer-encoding header value rigorously. An attacker may potentially exploit this issue to bypass a reverse proxy (which also has a poor header check), which may lead to an HTTP Request Smuggling attack.
A flaw was found in rubygem-json. While parsing certain JSON documents, the json gem (including the one bundled with Ruby) can be coerced into creating arbitrary objects in the target system. This is the same issue as CVE-2013-0269.
An issue was discovered in Ruby 4 before 4.0.5. A race condition leading to a use-after-free in the pthread-based getaddrinfo timeout handler (rbgetaddrinfo in ext/socket/raddrinfo.c) allows a remote attacker who can delay DNS responses near the user-specified timeout to crash a Ruby process that calls Addrinfo.getaddrinfo(..., timeout:) or Socket.tcp(..., resolvtimeout:). Memory-corruption-based exploitation is theoretically possible. The attack could, for example, be carried out through a crafted authoritative DNS server or recursive resolver.
Impact
The REXML gem before 3.3.9 has a ReDoS vulnerability when it parses an XML that has many digits between &# and x...; in a hex numeric character reference (&#x...;).
This does not happen with Ruby 3.2 or later. Ruby 3.1 is the only affected maintained Ruby. Note that Ruby 3.1 will reach EOL on 2025-03.
Patches
The REXML gem 3.3.9 or later include the patch to fix the vulnerability.
Workarounds
Use Ruby 3.2 or later instead of Ruby 3.1.
References
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2024/10/28/redos-rexml-cve-2024-49761/: An announce on www.ruby-lang.org
In the CGI gem before 0.4.2 for Ruby, a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability exists in the Util#escapeElement method.
Possible ReDoS vulnerability in Accept header parsing in Action Dispatch
There is a possible ReDoS vulnerability in the Accept header parsing routines of Action Dispatch. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-26142.
Versions Affected: >= 7.1.0, < 7.1.3.1 Not affected: < 7.1.0 Fixed Versions: 7.1.3.1
Impact ------ Carefully crafted Accept headers can cause Accept header parsing in Action Dispatch to take an unexpected amount of time, possibly resulting in a DoS vulnerability. All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.
Ruby 3.2 has mitigations for this problem, so Rails applications using Ruby 3.2 or newer are unaffected.
Releases -------- The fixed releases are available at the normal locations.
Workarounds ----------- There are no feasible workarounds for this issue.
Patches ------- To aid users who aren't able to upgrade immediately we have provided patches for the two supported release series. They are in git-am format and consist of a single changeset.
7-1-accept-redox.patch - Patch for 7.1 series
Credits ------- Thanks svalkanov for the report and patch!
In Puma (RubyGem) before 4.3.2 and 3.12.3, if an application using Puma allows untrusted input in a response header, an attacker can use newline characters (i.e. CR, LF or/r, /n) to end the header and inject malicious content, such as additional headers or an entirely new response body. This vulnerability is known as HTTP Response Splitting.
While not an attack in itself, response splitting is a vector for several other attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS).
This is related to CVE-2019-16254, which fixed this vulnerability for the WEBrick Ruby web server.
This has been fixed in versions 4.3.2 and 3.12.3 by checking all headers for line endings and rejecting headers with those characters.
Dir.open, Dir.new, Dir.entries and Dir.empty? accept the path of the target directory as their parameter. If the parameter contains NUL (\0) bytes, these methods recognize that the path is completed before the NUL bytes. So, if a script accepts an external input as the argument of these methods, the attacker can make the unintentional directory traversal.
Affected versions:
Ruby 2.2 series: 2.2.9 and earlier Ruby 2.3 series: 2.3.6 and earlier Ruby 2.4 series: 2.4.3 and earlier Ruby 2.5 series: 2.5.0 and earlier
External References:
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2018/03/28/poisoned-nul-byte-dir-cve-2018-8780/
In Ruby before 2.2.10, 2.3.x before 2.3.7, 2.4.x before 2.4.4, 2.5.x before 2.5.1, and 2.6.0-preview1, the UNIXServer.open and UNIXSocket.open methods are not checked for null characters. It may be connected to an unintended socket.
If an attacker sends a large request which contains huge HTTP headers, WEBrick try to process it on memory, so the request causes the out-of-memory DoS attack.
Affected versions:
Ruby 2.2 series: 2.2.9 and earlier Ruby 2.3 series: 2.3.6 and earlier Ruby 2.4 series: 2.4.3 and earlier Ruby 2.5 series: 2.5.0 and earlier
External References:
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2018/03/28/large-request-dos-in-webrick-cve-2018-8777/
In Ruby before 2.2.10, 2.3.x before 2.3.7, 2.4.x before 2.4.4, 2.5.x before 2.5.1, and 2.6.0-preview1, an attacker controlling the unpacking format (similar to format string vulnerabilities) can trigger a buffer under-read in the String#unpack method, resulting in a massive and controlled information disclosure.
Dir.mktmpdir method introduced by tmpdir library accepts the prefix and the suffix of the directory which is created as the first parameter. The prefix can contain relative directory specifiers "../", so this method can be used to target any directory. So, if a script accepts an external input as the prefix, and the targeted directory has inappropriate permissions or the ruby process has inappropriate privileges, the attacker can create a directory or a file at any directory.
Affected versions:
Ruby 2.2 series: 2.2.9 and earlier Ruby 2.3 series: 2.3.6 and earlier Ruby 2.4 series: 2.4.3 and earlier Ruby 2.5 series: 2.5.0 and earlier
External References:
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2018/03/28/unintentional-file-and-directory-creation-with-directory-traversal-cve-2018-6914/
The parsecharclass function in regparse.c in the Onigmo (aka Oniguruma-mod) regular expression library, as used in Ruby 2.4.0, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (deep recursion and application crash) via a crafted regular expression.
DISPUTED The openssl extension in Ruby 2.x does not properly maintain the state of process memory after a file is reopened, which allows remote attackers to spoof signatures within the context of a Ruby script that attempts signature verification after performing a certain sequence of filesystem operations. NOTE: this issue has been disputed by the Ruby OpenSSL team and third parties, who state that the original demonstration PoC contains errors and redundant or unnecessarily-complex code that does not appear to be related to a demonstration of the issue. As of 20140502, CVE is not aware of any public comment by the original researcher.
ext/openssl/osslocsp.c in Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 does not properly check the return value from the OCSPbasicverify function, which might allow remote attackers to successfully present an invalid X.509 certificate, possibly involving a revoked certificate.
Last updated 25 August 2025
A ReDoS issue was discovered in the Time component through 0.2.1 in Ruby through 3.2.1. The Time parser mishandles invalid URLs that have specific characters. It causes an increase in execution time for parsing strings to Time objects. The fixed versions are 0.1.1 and 0.2.2.
Last updated 25 August 2025
A flaw was found in Ruby. RubyGems cgi gem could allow a remote attacker to conduct spoofing attacks caused by the mishandling of security prefixes in cookie names in the CGI::Cookie.parse function. By sending a specially-crafted request, an attacker could perform cookie prefix spoofing attacks.
DL::dlopen could open a library with tainted library name even if $SAFE > 0. This vulnerability affects Ruby versions 1.8, 1.9, 2.1, 2.2.
Upstream patch: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/4600cf725a86ce31266153647ae5aa1197b1215b
Additional information and CVE assignment:
http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q3/222
DL::dlopen could open a library with tainted library name even if $SAFE > 0. This vulnerability affects Ruby versions 1.8, 1.9, 2.1, 2.2.
Upstream patch: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/4600cf725a86ce31266153647ae5aa1197b1215b
Additional information and CVE assignment:
http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q3/222
Directory traversal vulnerability in controller/concerns/renderredirect.rb in the Wicked gem before 1.0.1 for Ruby allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files via a %2E%2E%2F (encoded dot dot slash) in the step.
A flaw was found in the way the Ruby REXML library parsed XML documents. Parsing a specially crafted XML document using REXML and writing parsed data back to a new XML document results in creating a document with a different structure. This issue could affect the integrity of processed data in applications using REXML that parse XML documents, write data back to XML, and re-parse them again.
A malicious FTP server can use the PASV response to trick Net::FTP into connecting back to a given IP address and port. This potentially makes Net::FTP extract information about services that are otherwise private and not disclosed (e.g., the attacker can conduct port scans and service banner extractions).
References:
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2021/07/07/trusting-pasv-responses-in-net-ftp/
A regular expression based DoS vulnerability in Action Dispatch <6.1.7.1 and <7.0.4.1 related to the If-None-Match header. A specially crafted HTTP If-None-Match header can cause the regular expression engine to enter a state of catastrophic backtracking, when on a version of Ruby below 3.2.0. This can cause the process to use large amounts of CPU and memory, leading to a possible DoS vulnerability All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.
A double free was found in the Regexp compiler in Ruby 3.x before 3.0.4 and 3.1.x before 3.1.2. If a victim attempts to create a Regexp from untrusted user input, an attacker may be able to write to unexpected memory locations.
Last updated 25 August 2025
Last updated 25 August 2025
It was found that the decode method of the OpenSSL::ASN1 module was vulnerable to buffer underrun. An attacker could pass a specially crafted string to the application in order to crash the ruby interpreter, causing a denial of service.