CVE-2013-0269: Denial of Service and Unsafe Object Creation Vulnerability

When parsing certain JSON documents, the JSON gem can be coerced in to creating Ruby symbols in a target system. Since Ruby symbols are not garbage collected, this can result in a denial of service attack. The same technique can be used to create objects in a target system that act like internal objects. These “act alike” objects can be used to bypass certain security mechanisms and can be used as a spring board for SQL injection attacks in Ruby on Rails.