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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2021-22880 json

Active Record subject to Regular Expression Denial-of-Service (ReDoS)

published 2021-02-11 5 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-8hc4-xxm3-5ppp , EUVD-2021-0633

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
4.5%
EPSS 4.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 91%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The PostgreSQL adapter in Active Record before 6.1.2.1, 6.0.3.5, 5.2.4.5 suffers from a regular expression denial of service (REDoS) vulnerability. Carefully crafted input can cause the input validation in the `money` type of the PostgreSQL adapter in Active Record to spend too much time in a regular expression, resulting in the potential for a DoS attack. This only impacts Rails applications that are using PostgreSQL along with money type columns that take user input.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems activerecord 5.2.4.5, 6.0.3.5, 6.1.2.1
  • rubyonrails rails 5.2.4.5, 6.0.3.5, 6.1.2.1
  • rails Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 2:6.0.3.5+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2021-22880

  • rubygem-activerecord-5_1 SLE High Availability Extension 15 SP3, SLE High Availability Extension 15 SP2, SLE High Availability Extension 15 SP1 +1 more 5.1.4-5.3.3
  • rubygem-activerecord-4_2 OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 9, OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 8 4.2.9-6.6.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2021:3634-1SUSE-SU-2021:3267-1

  • rubygem-activerecord-6.0 openSUSE Tumbleweed 6.0.4.4-1.1
  • rubygem-activerecord-5_1 openSUSE Leap 15.2 5.1.4-lp152.4.3.1
  • rubygem-activerecord-5_1 openSUSE Leap 15.3 5.1.4-5.3.3

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11826-1openSUSE-SU-2021:1468-1openSUSE-SU-2021:3634-1

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-2021-22880 updated cvss 7.5

rubygem-activerecord: crafted input may cause a regular expression DoS

  • Red Hat CloudForms Management Engine 5 cfme-gemset
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform 2 system, rubygem-activerecord rubygem-activerecord Red Hat Satellite 6 tfm-rubygem-activerecord, tfm-ror52-rubygem-activerecord
    affected: no fix available, no fix planned “Will not fix”

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

4.49% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 91% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • hackerone.com https://hackerone.com/reports/1023899 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 activerecord
>=5.0.0, <5.2.4.5
>=6.0.0, <6.0.3.5
>=6.1.0, <6.1.2.1
5.2.4.5
6.0.3.5
6.1.2.1

Affected products

  • n/a https://github.com/rails/rails

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
Technology feeds

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.