Vulnerabilities > CVE-2017-16516 - Use of Externally-Controlled Format String vulnerability in multiple products
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
NONE Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
HIGH Summary
In the yajl-ruby gem 1.3.0 for Ruby, when a crafted JSON file is supplied to Yajl::Parser.new.parse, the whole ruby process crashes with a SIGABRT in the yajl_string_decode function in yajl_encode.c. This results in the whole ruby process terminating and potentially a denial of service.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 1 | |
| OS | 1 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Format String Injection An attacker includes formatting characters in a string input field on the target application. Most applications assume that users will provide static text and may respond unpredictably to the presence of formatting character. For example, in certain functions of the C programming languages such as printf, the formatting character %s will print the contents of a memory location expecting this location to identify a string and the formatting character %n prints the number of DWORD written in the memory. An attacker can use this to read or write to memory locations or files, or simply to manipulate the value of the resulting text in unexpected ways. Reading or writing memory may result in program crashes and writing memory could result in the execution of arbitrary code if the attacker can write to the program stack.
- String Format Overflow in syslog() This attack targets the format string vulnerabilities in the syslog() function. An attacker would typically inject malicious input in the format string parameter of the syslog function. This is a common problem, and many public vulnerabilities and associated exploits have been posted.
Nessus
| NASL family | Debian Local Security Checks |
| NASL id | DEBIAN_DLA-1167.NASL |
| description | A vulnerability was found in ruby-yajl, an interface to Yajl, a JSON stream-based parser library. When a crafted JSON file is supplied to Yajl::Parser.new.parse, the whole ruby process crashes with a SIGABRT in the yajl_string_decode function in yajl_encode.c. This may result in a denial of service. For Debian 7 |
| last seen | 2020-03-17 |
| modified | 2017-11-09 |
| plugin id | 104464 |
| published | 2017-11-09 |
| reporter | This script is Copyright (C) 2017-2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof. |
| source | https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/104464 |
| title | Debian DLA-1167-1 : ruby-yajl security update |
| code | |