> Upgrading to GitLab 19.3.6 on October 22 didn’t fix the vulnerability. The fix isn’t in GitLab’s own code but in a patch to Ruby, which GitLab applies only in its official packages. Our image used standard Ruby, so it didn’t get the patch.
> The bug is in Ruby’s regular expression engine, so any program that compiles regular expressions from untrusted input is exposed, not only GitLab.
I feel like this era of constant exploits/patches is really bad for those who build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often. I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting...
The patch for Ruby came out 6 days ago. Most Rails apps do not use the Ruby from the package manager but have a hardcoded version in the repo. So unless you have developers releasing a PR to update ruby the moment it comes out, you aren't safe.
This might feel like a "Yeah obviously" moment, but the fact is that very few Rails apps are running the latest ruby release the moment it comes out.
At this point if you are self hosting you should have everything behind a VPN. Only companies with their own security and development teams should be putting things on the public internet.
Gosh I'm at a big company and I'm pretty sure all the self-hosted tools are only accessible through VPN-like tech anyway. The only truly public stuff is Jira, Confluence (which I assume it more to do with Atlassian's pricing of self-hosted) and Sharepoint.
Atlassian products (Jira Server) are no longer supported, and their more Enterprise offering dies in 2029, so everything is ending up in their cloud now yeah.
I know a lot of companies vibe-coding alternatives. I'm not an expert but it's perhaps even illegal for most European companies to migrate any customer data to Atlassian servers.
This person is just posting absolutely baseless claims, as if Atlassian, a company that basically exists purely on the back of B2B SaaS sales, has not considered EU data residency requirements in their core product offering: https://www.atlassian.com/software/data-residency
Yeah I thought Jira at least was all built on AWS these days. I've never set up a Jira Cloud instance but I'd be surprised if you don't chose where your data lives.
> build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often.
I mean - this incident brings it into sharper focus - but it's always been thus.
As a Go developer I often tell people "Be wary of vendoring, you are creating a cache of dependencies that need to be managed and maintained"
Or people that "pin" dependencies, they face the same difficulty.
Why not just use "official" (in this case) images - sometimes they lag too - hell, most Linux distributions lag so much with Go compiler packages that, again, I routinely tell people to avoid them in favour of watching the Go official page
What’s interesting with steam boilers and other types of OSHA related injuries is that it’s not enough that the person who’s doing the stupid thing dies: you have to enforce it even more and even higher. People won’t value their life.
The world has changed but 15 years ago we thought it was utterly insane to just pull whatever $latest from $internetsite.probablytrusted.org as part of your build and deployment process.
> We have not requested CVE identifiers in Ruby for these fixes, at least for now.
> Ruby has generally considered it unsafe to compile and use a regular expression created from untrusted input. We stated this in the advisory for CVE-2022-28738, where we nevertheless treated a double free in Regexp compilation as a vulnerability after a comprehensive assessment. We did the same for CVE-2024-27282.
It's a Bad Idea (TM) to compile a regular expression from an untrusted input.
Despite what anyone would try to sell you, a regular expression is a programming language. It's Always A Bad Idea (TM) to compile untrusted input into any kind of programming language. Don't string concatenate SQL queries, eval is evil, it's all the same idea.
A regex might be a programming language, a proper regular expression (which there are libraries for, like Google RE2) is just a regular language and I don't think you can even charitably call that a programming language.
> I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting
The future is near constant burning of tokens in your software factory to do this automatically. The labs create the increase in demand for their own product.
That's a for now problem. The future is probably less software surface area exposed to the internet, the removal of unsafe languages from software exposed to the network, services like Cloudflare deploying firewalls to detect exploit attempts, and services that can keep a live database of currently active bots and residential proxies to IP block them.
Alongside the current scanning and patching of software.
I don't disagree. Also probably more logs and more metrics since LLMs can scale instrumentation, signals and auditing far beyond what humans could ever process, which in turn, more tokens. Probably larger Datadog bills too.
Turns out building the world on an infrastructure of lies has finally caught up with us.
The way LLMs are developed now is but one possible future we could have experienced. Imagine the future where the LLMs were built by a few governments with black budgets and hidden until a war or some other large event broke out. Then suddenly most of the computers and digital infrastructure shits itself as everything goes wonky.
At least this way we get to see that a shared global infrastructure built on the idea that security is someone else's problem was a really bad idea and we might have enough time to fix it or pull enough plugs we don't go back to the dark age.
I've been calling this out for forever now and have been repeatedly told that actually, competent devs with C are fine and the C software we use has been battle tested so it's largely secure.
And how does Rust help? As far as I know, an integer overflow in Rust panics in debug but just wraps in release (a bad choice in my opinion). Would it help specifically in the code execution part of the exploit?
The key difference is even If an Integer overflows in Rust It still doesn't violate memory safety in safe Rust and therefore doesn't lead to exploitation.
Have researchers coined the term `Superbug` or `MegaVuln` yet?
Surely we're approaching a point where an LLM discovers a critical, unfixable vulnerability in every device running any version of $OS, then irresponsibly discloses it, triggering mass collective trauma among admins worldwide, significant downtime in critical infrastructure and scores of deaths.
That's what Meltdown, Spectre, Rowhammer, and other hardware bugs have been. While you can't patch the hardware, there have always been software level mitigations.
Thankfully a lot of the low level stuff is just not that exposed to the network so even if you find a bug in some firmware, you still have to find a way to access it over the network.
We've adopted a zero-risk posture at our org. We've taken down numerous amounts of services over the last few weeks related to PHP, Node, and Python until things are properly vetted.
We joked in our last internal meeting that this is the end of public software... I have a feeling we may be right, at least in the very short term.
This is a fantastic write up on the security incident. Almost any incident like this will have unknowns. It's good to make it explicit. I especially liked the part of what would have been leaked if the attacker was successful. Maybe they could include what type of hash was used.
Does anyone know for sure which unsupported versions of ruby are affected? Best I can tell 3 of the four affect old versions of ruby that are not getting a security patch for this. Update your ruby!
> If you use our alpinelinux/gitlab container image, pull alpinelinux/gitlab:19.3.6 again. The image published on October 27 contains Ruby 3.3.13. Any 19.3.6 image you pulled before October 27, and all older tags, are vulnerable.
shouldn't they tag a new version instead of re-releasing a fixed 19.3.6, if earlier 19.3.6 are vulnerable?
The nasty part is that a version scan would have called that 19.3.6 image fixed. The CVE is filed against GitLab, and 19.3.6 is past the fixed version. The actual fix is in Ruby, and Ruby shipped it without requesting a CVE, so anything scanning the Ruby in the image has no advisory to match. If you build GitLab yourself, you had to read GitLab's release notes and then check which Ruby you were on.
JLO64 | 4 hours ago
> The bug is in Ruby’s regular expression engine, so any program that compiles regular expressions from untrusted input is exposed, not only GitLab.
I feel like this era of constant exploits/patches is really bad for those who build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often. I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting...
esseph | 4 hours ago
Gigachad | 4 hours ago
This might feel like a "Yeah obviously" moment, but the fact is that very few Rails apps are running the latest ruby release the moment it comes out.
edoceo | 3 hours ago
edoceo | 4 hours ago
Gigachad | 4 hours ago
jamesfinlayson | 3 hours ago
Operyl | 3 hours ago
egeozcan | 3 hours ago
bombcar | 3 hours ago
I’m doing my part!
griffiths | 3 hours ago
Sebguer | an hour ago
jamesfinlayson | 47 minutes ago
awesome_dude | 4 hours ago
I mean - this incident brings it into sharper focus - but it's always been thus.
As a Go developer I often tell people "Be wary of vendoring, you are creating a cache of dependencies that need to be managed and maintained"
Or people that "pin" dependencies, they face the same difficulty.
Why not just use "official" (in this case) images - sometimes they lag too - hell, most Linux distributions lag so much with Go compiler packages that, again, I routinely tell people to avoid them in favour of watching the Go official page
weinzierl | 4 hours ago
We've git that under control with regulation and the help of organizations, some of which still exist today.
This "era of constant exploits/patches" is not normal and can't go on. Currently it is an ongoing cat and mouse game, but it doesn't have to be.
bombcar | 3 hours ago
esseph | an hour ago
Security is always reactive by its very nature. You can do proactive things, but you will always be reactive to novel attacks.
Expect everything to have various levels of rolling upgrades, and soon. That's a lot of work.
rconti | 4 hours ago
milkshakes | 3 hours ago
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2026/10/23/regexp-fixes-fo...
> We have not requested CVE identifiers in Ruby for these fixes, at least for now.
> Ruby has generally considered it unsafe to compile and use a regular expression created from untrusted input. We stated this in the advisory for CVE-2022-28738, where we nevertheless treated a double free in Regexp compilation as a vulnerability after a comprehensive assessment. We did the same for CVE-2024-27282.
couchand | 3 hours ago
Despite what anyone would try to sell you, a regular expression is a programming language. It's Always A Bad Idea (TM) to compile untrusted input into any kind of programming language. Don't string concatenate SQL queries, eval is evil, it's all the same idea.
Blackthorn | 2 hours ago
milkshakes | 7 minutes ago
i agree with you!
nevertheless,
> where we nevertheless treated a double free in Regexp compilation as a vulnerability after a comprehensive assessment
not sure what sort of comprehensive assessment is still called for at this point?
0x1F8B | 2 hours ago
The future is near constant burning of tokens in your software factory to do this automatically. The labs create the increase in demand for their own product.
Gigachad | 2 hours ago
Alongside the current scanning and patching of software.
0x1F8B | 2 hours ago
esseph | an hour ago
I don't think that lasts, I've seen at least 5 viable replacements now. All internal projects at major US companies.
pixl97 | 2 hours ago
The way LLMs are developed now is but one possible future we could have experienced. Imagine the future where the LLMs were built by a few governments with black budgets and hidden until a war or some other large event broke out. Then suddenly most of the computers and digital infrastructure shits itself as everything goes wonky.
At least this way we get to see that a shared global infrastructure built on the idea that security is someone else's problem was a really bad idea and we might have enough time to fix it or pull enough plugs we don't go back to the dark age.
jayd16 | 2 hours ago
cowlevel | 4 hours ago
Who else is tired of C libraries since this week?
Gigachad | 4 hours ago
And now we are seeing that was all untrue.
cristoperb | 3 hours ago
awesome_dude | 2 hours ago
How about being constructive instead - old bug in old code is no surprise, no matter the language/technology.
Gigachad | an hour ago
fartfeatures | an hour ago
https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to...
grg0 | 2 hours ago
jooops1 | 2 hours ago
Fordec | 16 minutes ago
ferrisjoke | 2 hours ago
andrewinardeer | 3 hours ago
Surely we're approaching a point where an LLM discovers a critical, unfixable vulnerability in every device running any version of $OS, then irresponsibly discloses it, triggering mass collective trauma among admins worldwide, significant downtime in critical infrastructure and scores of deaths.
Gigachad | 3 hours ago
Thankfully a lot of the low level stuff is just not that exposed to the network so even if you find a bug in some firmware, you still have to find a way to access it over the network.
missmewiththatl | 3 hours ago
We joked in our last internal meeting that this is the end of public software... I have a feeling we may be right, at least in the very short term.
fhn | 3 hours ago
xtracto | an hour ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189092
jtchang | 3 hours ago
stevepike | 3 hours ago
I do think CVE-2026-89078 - the double free one - may only affect ruby 3.3.11 and above. It relies on a bug introduced in ruby 3.4/4 via https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/8cd295ecf0 and backported (maybe accidentally?) in 3.3.11/12 in https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/e02c892ade. So that one is getting patched on all rubies it would have affected.
literallyroy | 2 hours ago
akersten | an hour ago
shouldn't they tag a new version instead of re-releasing a fixed 19.3.6, if earlier 19.3.6 are vulnerable?
wilson-draugr | 46 minutes ago
milkshakes | 5 minutes ago