XML – Insinuator.net

This post tries to give an overview about the background and impact of the new Rails XML parameter parsing vulnerability patched today.

The bug

The root cause of the vulnerability is Rails handling of formatted parameters. In addition to standard GET and POST parameter formats, Rails can handle multiple different data encodings inside the body of POST requests. By default JSON and XML are supported. While support for JSON is widely used in production, the XML functionality does not seem to be known by many Rails developers.

XML parameter parsing

The code responsible for parsing these different data types is shown below:

# actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/params_parser.rb 
....
DEFAULT_PARSERS = {
      Mime::XML => : xml_simple,
      Mime::JSON => :json
    }
....
def parse_formatted_parameters(env)
        ...
        when Proc
          strategy.call(request.raw_post)
        when : xml_simple, : xml_node
          data = Hash.from_xml(request.raw_post) || {}
          data.with_indifferent_access
        when :yaml
          YAML.load(request.raw_post)
        when :json
          data = ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(request.raw_post)
          data = {:_json => data} unless data.is_a?(Hash)
          data.with_indifferent_access
        else
          false
        end
...

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