Merck Developer Portal Case Study

A glimpse into our process from start to finish on a developer portal
project for Merck.

Details

When reading text nodes from an XML document, the REXML parser can be coerced into allocating extremely large string objects which can consume all of the memory on a machine, causing a denial of service.

Impacted code will look something like this:

require 'rexml/document'

xml = <<XML
<!DOCTYPE root [
  # ENTITY expansion vector
]>
<cd></cd>
XML

p REXML::Document.new(xml)

All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of the workarounds immediately.

Workarounds

If you cannot upgrade Ruby, use this monkey patch as a workaround on versions of Ruby 2.1.0+:

class REXML::Entity
  def value
      if @value
        matches = @value.scan(PEREFERENCE_RE)
        rv = @value.clone
        if @parent
          sum = 0
          matches.each do |entity_reference|
            entity_value = @parent.entity( entity_reference[0] )
            if sum + entity_value.bytesize > Security.entity_expansion_text_limit
              raise "entity expansion has grown too large"
            else
              sum += entity_value.bytesize
            end
            rv.gsub!( /%#{entity_reference.join};/um, entity_value )
          end
        end
        return rv
      end
      nil
   end
end

For versions of Ruby older than 2.1.0, you can use the following monkey patch:

class REXML::Entity
  def value
      if @value
        matches = @value.scan(PEREFERENCE_RE)
        rv = @value.clone
        if @parent
          sum = 0
          matches.each do |entity_reference|
            entity_value = @parent.entity( entity_reference[0] )
            if sum + entity_value.bytesize > Document.entity_expansion_text_limit
              raise "entity expansion has grown too large"
            else
              sum += entity_value.bytesize
            end
            rv.gsub!( /%#{entity_reference.join};/um, entity_value )
          end
        end
        return rv
      end
      nil
   end
end

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