An update released last week for RubyGems includes several security improvements and patches for various types of vulnerabilities.
RubyGems 2.7.6 patches path traversal vulnerabilities that exist when writing to a symlinked basedir outside of the root and during gem installation. It also fixes a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the homepage attribute when displayed via gem server, and a possible unsafe object deserialization flaw.
This was not the only deserialization issue patched recently in RubyGems. Back in October, developers informed users that an unsafe deserialization vulnerability could have been exploited for remote code execution.
The latest version of RubyGems also includes some security improvements, such as triggering a security error when a package contains duplicate files, enforcing URL validation on the spec homepage attribute, and strictly interpreting octal fields in tar headers.
Yasin Soliman, nmalkin and plover have each been credited for two of the vulnerabilities patched in RubyGems 2.7.6.
A total of five security holes were patched in RubyGems last year. The deserialization issue, tracked as CVE-2017-0903, and an ANSI escape sequence vulnerability identified as CVE-2017-0899 were the only ones rated “high severity” based on their CVSS score.
Other vulnerabilities fixed last year included a DNS request hijacking issue, a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw, and a weakness that could have been exploited by malicious gems to overwrite arbitrary files.
Five vulnerabilities were also patched last year in Ruby itself, including command injection and memory corruption issues.
Related: Critical Vulnerabilities Patched in Apache CouchDB
Related: Researchers Uncover Critical RubyGems Vulnerabilities
Related: GitHub Warns Developers When Using Vulnerable Libraries