Bug 770820 (CVE-2011-4838)

Summary:	CVE-2011-4838 jruby: hash table collisions DoS (oCERT-2011-003)
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala <huzaifas>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	CC:	jlieskov, mjc, vondruch
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2021-10-19 21:50:20 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	770821, 771530, 771536
Bug Blocks:	770822, 770929

Description Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2011-12-29 10:44:45 UTC

Julian Wälde and Alexander Klink reported a flaw in the hash function used in
the implementation of the JRuby arrays implemented using the hash table.

A specially-crafted set of keys could trigger hash function collisions, which
degrade hash table performance by changing hash table operations complexity
from an expected/average O(1) to the worst case O(n).  Reporters were able to
find colliding strings efficiently using equivalent substrings or meet in the
middle techniques.

As various web application frameworks for Ruby automatically pre-fill certain
arrays with data from the HTTP request (such as GET or POST parameters) for
Ruby web applications, a remote attacker could use this flaw to make the Ruby
interpreter use an excessive amount of CPU time by sending a POST request with
a large number parameters which hash to the same value.

This problem is similar to the issue that was previously reported for and fixed
in e.g. perl:
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/CrosbyWallach_UsenixSec2003.pdf

Note: This issue have been fixed in version 1.6.5.1 of JRuby
http://www.jruby.org/2011/12/27/jruby-1-6-5-1.html

Comment 2 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2011-12-29 10:48:22 UTC

Created jruby tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-16 [bug 770821]

Comment 4 David Jorm 2012-01-03 02:00:39 UTC

JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.2.0 ships JRuby 1.6.5 as part of the scripting_chain quickstart sample application. JRuby 1.6.5 exposes this flaw, although the sample application itself does not appear to expose the flaw. If the version of JRuby shipped with the scripting_chain sample application was used to build a custom application, then this flaw could be exposed. Bugs have been filed to update the sample application to use JRuby 1.6.5.1:

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBESB-3725
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SOA-3680

Comment 8 Murray McAllister 2012-07-02 23:43:01 UTC

Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank oCERT for reporting this issue. oCERT acknowledges Julian Wälde and Alexander Klink as the original reporters.

Comment 9 errata-xmlrpc 2012-07-31 14:33:40 UTC

This issue has been addressed in following products:

  JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.3.0

Via RHSA-2012:1125 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1125.html

Comment 10 Jan Lieskovsky 2012-11-12 11:24:44 UTC

Relevant upstream patch:
  https://github.com/jruby/jruby/commit/f007944b459e7c5e33b8296433d8b9d704bf02cc