NOTE: A previous patch, 1.4.2, fixed the heap memory issue, but could still lead to a DoS infinite loop. Please update to version 1.4.3

The 1.x branch and the 2.x branch of yajl contain an integer overflow which leads to subsequent heap memory corruption when dealing with large (~2GB) inputs.

Details

The reallocation logic at yajlbuf.c#L64 may result in the need 32bit integer wrapping to 0 when need approaches a value of 0x80000000 (i.e. ~2GB of data), which results in a reallocation of buf->alloc into a small heap chunk.

These integers are declared as sizet in the 2.x branch of yajl, which practically prevents the issue from triggering on 64bit platforms, however this does not preclude this issue triggering on 32bit builds on which sizet is a 32bit integer.

Subsequent population of this under-allocated heap chunk is based on the original buffer size, leading to heap memory corruption.

Impact

We rate this as a moderate severity vulnerability which mostly impacts process availability as we believe exploitation for arbitrary code execution to be unlikely.

Patches

Patched in yajl-ruby 1.4.3

Workarounds

Avoid passing large inputs to YAJL

References https://github.com/brianmario/yajl-ruby/blob/7168bd79b888900aa94523301126f968a93eb3a6/ext/yajl/yajlbuf.c#L64

For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: Open an issue in yajl-ruby

In the yajl-ruby gem 1.3.0 for Ruby, when a crafted JSON file is supplied to Yajl::Parser.new.parse, the whole ruby process crashes with a SIGABRT in the yajlstringdecode function in yajlencode.c. This results in the whole ruby process terminating and potentially a denial of service.