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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2017-16516 json

yajl-ruby gem Denial of Service vulnerability

published 2017-11-03 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-wwh7-4jw9-33x6 , EUVD-2017-0355

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.8%
EPSS 3.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 89%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the yajl-ruby gem 1.3.0 for Ruby, when a crafted JSON file is supplied to Yajl::Parser.new.parse, the whole ruby process crashes with a SIGABRT in the yajl_string_decode function in yajl_encode.c. This results in the whole ruby process terminating and potentially a denial of service.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems yajl-ruby 1.3.1
  • burp Debian 13 3.1.4-2
  • yajl Debian 12 2.1.0-3+deb12u2
  • yajl Debian 14, Debian 13 2.1.0-4
  • ruby-yajl Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.2.0-3.1
  • r-cran-jsonlite Debian 14, Debian 13 1.8.8+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-16516

  • yajl Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 2.1.0-3ubuntu0.20.04.1
  • yajl Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 2.1.0-3ubuntu0.22.04.1
  • yajl Ubuntu Pro 14.04 LTS 2.0.4-4ubuntu0.1~esm1
  • yajl Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS 2.1.0-2ubuntu0.16.04.1~esm1
  • yajl Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS 2.1.0-2ubuntu0.18.04.1~esm1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2017-16516

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2017-16516 updated cvss 7.5

rubygem-yajl-ruby: Yajl:: Parser.new.parse incorrect parsing

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (Kilo) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 (Liberty) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 (Mitaka) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 (Newton) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 (Ocata) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 (Pike) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 (Queens) Operational Tools rubygem-yajl-ruby
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat Virtualization 4 rubygem-yajl-ruby
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 3 rubygem-yajl-ruby
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

3.77% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 89% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/brianmario/yajl-ruby/issues/176 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
rubygems yajl-ruby
<1.3.1
1.3.1

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-134 Use of Externally-Controlled Format String

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.