It's not a vulnerability, but it's an exploit. Most vulnerabilities in the wild never have an exploit written, because we mostly assume that for example arbitrary write or buffer overflow are dangerous and "can lead to arbitrary code execution", but actually exploiting them is hard.
This is someone who spend some time to write something to actually exploit sites with this vulnerability.
Which brings us to the old saying: Do not deserialize untrusted data.
In the context of Rubygems and their specs this obviously is harder to manage but dependencies such as Rubygems are and will always be part of your app's Trusted Computing Base.
> dependencies such as Rubygems are and will always be part of your app's Trusted Computing Base
This mindset is changing, in the npm ecosystem, managing and updating dependencies have become somewhat of a gamble. It is no longer if, its when you are compromised.
the java ecosystem spent a decade on the same lesson. commons-collections was the first universal gadget library, and attempts to remove gadgets from the classpath were an endless game of catch-up. JEP 290 was the eventual solution: a filter mechanism that enforces which classes are even allowed to be deserialized, rather than trying to audit what classes exist. ruby doesn't have an equivalent. as long as marshal.load on untrusted input exists in the codebase, chasing individual gadgets isn't the fix.
That's actually crafty. I wonder what the rationale was for the C function time_mload(). Anyone able to find out? How can we see which person created it first?
Look at TOB-RGM-9 (an informational, largely out-of-scope finding) if you want to understand what could be done to mitigate some of these concerns. Nearly all of these gadget chains rely on Gem library functionality, which has this wonky .gemspec.rz metadata file that sits alongside the actual gem file. I understand that it'd be a challenging, backwards-incompatible change, but moving this file from Marshal to JSON would break a lot of these gadget chains. Perhaps there would be others, but it would raise the bar.
Did the OpenAI "sandbox" have Ruby available or a "sandboxed Ruby", which is an idiotic idea that would be fully expected from slop companies?
We are living in a post-fact society where we have to guess bits of information from YouTube videos and OpenAI slop statements. Maybe there should be a Senate hearing about the hack if that is what it takes.
Nextgrid | 9 hours ago
The Marshal.load docs explicitly have a warning that you should not pass it untrusted data: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/Marshal.html#module-mar...
Retr0id | 9 hours ago
superjan | 2 hours ago
ksbd-pls-finish | an hour ago
This is someone who spend some time to write something to actually exploit sites with this vulnerability.
sebiw | 9 hours ago
In the context of Rubygems and their specs this obviously is harder to manage but dependencies such as Rubygems are and will always be part of your app's Trusted Computing Base.
sscaryterry | 8 hours ago
This mindset is changing, in the npm ecosystem, managing and updating dependencies have become somewhat of a gamble. It is no longer if, its when you are compromised.
_joel | 8 hours ago
rjsw | 5 hours ago
manewitz | 11 minutes ago
jbverschoor | 7 hours ago
And when the sig. changes, you should get a warning
Very similar to the iOS entitlements
wyager | 8 hours ago
I think the better lesson is "use safe codecs"
ares623 | 7 hours ago
saadyousfi | 8 hours ago
mono442 | 7 hours ago
> Marshal.load is not suitable as a general purpose serialization format and you should never unmarshal user supplied input or other untrusted data.
shevy-java | 7 hours ago
pmontra | 4 hours ago
You can check the git blame and all the history. Unsurprisingly the function itself is from the 90s.
schwag09 | 5 hours ago
I was also part of the team that audited RubyGems.org: https://github.com/trailofbits/publications/blob/master/revi...
Look at TOB-RGM-9 (an informational, largely out-of-scope finding) if you want to understand what could be done to mitigate some of these concerns. Nearly all of these gadget chains rely on Gem library functionality, which has this wonky .gemspec.rz metadata file that sits alongside the actual gem file. I understand that it'd be a challenging, backwards-incompatible change, but moving this file from Marshal to JSON would break a lot of these gadget chains. Perhaps there would be others, but it would raise the bar.
dorianmariewo | 5 hours ago
35129ab | 4 hours ago
We are living in a post-fact society where we have to guess bits of information from YouTube videos and OpenAI slop statements. Maybe there should be a Senate hearing about the hack if that is what it takes.
jamesgeck0 | 3 hours ago