Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Ruby on Rails gets patches for SQL injection vulnerabilities

news
Jul 7, 20142 mins

The two vulnerabilities affect Rails applications that use PostgreSQL as a database system

Two SQL injection vulnerabilities were patched in Ruby on Rails, a popular open-source Web development framework used by some high-profile websites.

The Rails developers released versions 3.2.19, 4.0.7 and 4.1.3 of the framework, and advised users to upgrade as soon as possible. Hours later they released versions 4.0.8 and 4.1.4 to fix a regression caused by the 4.0.7 and 4.1.3 updates.

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One of the two SQL injection vulnerabilities affects applications running on Rails 2.0.0 to 3.2.18 that also use the PostgreSQL database system and query bit string data types. The second vulnerability affects applications running on Rails 4.0.0 to 4.1.2 when using PostgreSQL and querying range data types.

Despite affecting different versions, the two flaws are related and both allow attackers to inject arbitrary SQL code into queries using specially crafted values.

“The only feasible workaround for this issue is to not allow user controlled values to be used in queries with the affected data types,” the Rails developers said in a security advisory. “Given the difficulty of ensuring this, upgrading is strongly advised.”

For cases where an immediate version upgrade is not possible, the developers also released code patches that can be applied manually.

Ruby on Rails has gained popularity among developers in recent years and is already used by large sites including Hulu, Scribd, Kickstarter and GitHub. This earned the framework inclusion into the Internet Bug Bounty program sponsored by Facebook and Microsoft as “a critical piece of internet infrastructure.”

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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