There is another Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Weakness in the Rails method strip_tag(). The problem was found in the HTML::Tokenizer which has bugs when parsing non-printable ASCII characters.

According to the original post, this has been fixed in Rails 2.3.5 and there is a patch for the 2.2. branch. Earlier versions are unsupported. Upgrade to a newer version if you make use of this method.

The workaround is this:

Users using strip_tags can pass the resulting output to the regular escaping functionality:

  <%= h(strip_tag(...)) %>

However, this is not how it should be. The strip_tags() method should work correctly. The workaround does work, but strip_tags() is based on HTML::Tokenizer which uses a very naive approach to parsing HTML code. It is based on regular expressions to analyze the code. For serious/enterprise implementations, you should not use an error-prone parser library.

• The REXML is a little better, but not very fast for large amounts of data. It has some bugs and it's not 100% standard compliant. For larger amounts of data, it may even be used to use a pull parser: REXML::Parsers::PullParser. Some people have successfully parsed HTML with it.
• And there is libxml, which is a real parser, now with ruby bindings. We haven't used it with (X)HTML, though. It has a pull parser too, and its quite like the REXML pull parser. LibXML is an extensive C-library which might not available on exotic Linux-derivates or Windows. Nokogiri is also based on LibXML.
• Update: If you're using JRuby, you can use tried and tested Java XHTML/XML parsers. For example Apache Xerces or the pull parser Woodstox which supports "almost well-formed" documents (like legacy (X)HTML content).

Rails version 2.3.4 has been released to fix two vulnerabilities.

• A timing weakness in the ClientCookieStore. Rails version 2.1.0 and all subsequent versions are affected. Detailed information can be found here.
• And a XSS vulnerability in the way Rails handles Unicode. This affects all versions in the Rails 2 branch, but not applications running with Ruby 1.9.

Upgrade to version 2.3.4 now, or apply a patch (available on the pages linked above).

A Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability was found in the BigDecimal standard Ruby library. An attacker could cause a segmentation fault and crash the Ruby interpreter. This is due to the BigDecimal method mishandling certain large values. Almost every Rails application is vulnerable to this because ActiveRecord relies on this method.

You are advised to update your Ruby installation. There is a temporary fix on Github. This fix breaks valid formats supported by BigDecimal, so you are advised to plan migrating to a new Ruby version.

There has been a security vulnerability in Rails in the HTTP digest authentication in Rails 2.3. That way someone can authenticate without any user name and password. The HTTP basic authentication seems to be not vulnerable to this problem.

The problem arises in the authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest method which will proceed even if the user name check returns nil.

You can find out more, including countermeasures at Nate's blog and the Rails weblog.

I'm back from the nice RailsWayCon(ference) in Berlin. I did a session on Ruby on Rails Security, check out the slides: