CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-22904 — Rubyonrails Rails security vulnerability
The actionpack ruby gem before 6.1.3.2, 6.0.3.7, 5.2.4.6, 5.2.6 suffers from a possible denial of service vulnerability in the Token Authentication logic in Action Controller due to a too permissive regular expression. Impacted code uses `authenticate_or_request_with_http_token` or `authenticate_with_http_token` for request authentication.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-06-11
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- rubyonrails / rails
Showing 1 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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