CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-33176 — Active Support is a toolkit of support libraries and Ruby core extensions extracted from the Rails framework

High CVSS 7.5

Active Support is a toolkit of support libraries and Ruby core extensions extracted from the Rails framework. Prior to versions 8.1.2.1, 8.0.4.1, and 7.2.3.1, Active Support number helpers accept strings containing scientific notation (e.g. `1e10000`), which `BigDecimal` expands into extremely large decimal representations. This can cause excessive memory allocation and CPU consumption when the expanded number is formatted, possibly resulting in a DoS vulnerability. Versions 8.1.2.1, 8.0.4.1, and 7.2.3.1 contain a patch.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • rubyonrails / rails

Showing 1 representative product identities from 3 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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