VIR Vulnerability Intelligence Relay

CVE-2013-4164

medium
Published 2013-11-23 · Modified 2026-04-29
💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation
CVSS v3
—
CVSS v4 NEW
—
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
7.8

Description

Heap-based buffer overflow in Ruby 1.8, 1.9 before 1.9.3-p484, 2.0 before 2.0.0-p353, 2.1 before 2.1.0 preview2, and trunk before revision 43780 allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (segmentation fault) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a string that is converted to a floating point value, as demonstrated using (1) the to_f method or (2) JSON.parse.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA
—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Metasploit modules

auxiliary_dos/http/rails_json_float_dos rank 300
Ruby on Rails JSON Processor Floating Point Heap Overflow DoS
Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

Application impact
VendorProductVersionsFixed
ruby ruby-langruby1.8
ruby ruby-langruby1.9
ruby ruby-langruby1.9.1
ruby ruby-langruby1.9.2
ruby ruby-langruby1.9.3
ruby ruby-langruby2.0.0
ruby ruby-langruby2.1

References

CWEs

CWE-119

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.