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Path Traversal occurrences in Rubygems

A Directory Traversal issue was discovered in RubyGems 2.7.6 and later through 3.0.2. Before making new directories or touching files (which now include path-checking code for symlinks), it would delete the target destination. If that destination was hidden behind a symlink, a malicious gem could delete arbitrary files on the user's machine, presuming the attacker could guess at paths. Given how frequently gem is run as sudo, and how predictable paths are on modern systems (/tmp, /usr, etc.), this could likely lead to data loss or an unusable system. (2019-06-06, CVE-2019-8320)

RubyGems version Ruby 2.2 series: 2.2.9 and earlier, Ruby 2.3 series: 2.3.6 and earlier, Ruby 2.4 series: 2.4.3 and earlier, Ruby 2.5 series: 2.5.0 and earlier, prior to trunk revision 62422 contains a Directory Traversal vulnerability in gem installation that can result in the gem could write to arbitrary filesystem locations during installation. This attack appear to be exploitable via the victim must install a malicious gem. This vulnerability appears to have been fixed in 2.7.6. (2018-03-13, CVE-2018-1000079)

Why Path Traversal can be dangerous

Relative Path Confusion means that your web server is configured to serve responses to ambiguous URLs. This configuration can possibly cause confusion about the correct relative path for the URL. It is also an issue of resources, such as images, styles etc., which are specified in the response using relative path, not the absolute URL.

If the web browser permits to parse "cross-content" response, the attacker may be able to fool the web browser into interpreting HTML into other content types, which can then lead to a cross site scripting attack (link do XSS).

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