This article is more than 1 year old

Ruby on Rails has SQL injection vuln

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The maintainers of Ruby on Rails are warning of an SQL injection vulnerability which affects all versions of the popular Web framework.

They advise that users should immediately apply an upgrade available here.

Designated CVE-2012-5664, the maintainers explain the bug this way: “Due to the way dynamic finders in Active Record extract options from method parameters, a method parameter can mistakenly be used as a scope. Carefully crafted requests can use the scope to inject arbitrary SQL.”

New versions have been released to eliminate the flaw, and the Ruby on Rails team also describes a workaround (for careful users who want to test the new versions before implementation). “The issue can be mitigated by explicitly converting the parameter to an expected value,” the post explains.

As noted by Threatpost, Phenoelit has a more detailed explanation of the impact of the bug here.

“When a RoR application is created the secret which goes into the HMAC will be created along with all the other files a minimal RoR application would need. This secret usually is a 64 byte long random string and lives in railsapp/config/initializers/secret_token.rb. The simple problem is, that most developers are simply not aware of the confidentiality of this file, and in result they'll happly check it into Github or other online repositories”, Phenoelit states.

If the HMAC key for an application is known, an attacker can easily send fake credentials to the application. ®

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