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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2023-22796 json

ReDoS based DoS vulnerability in Active Support's underscore

published 2023-01-18 3 y ago modified 2026-10-24 15 d ago also GHSA-j6gc-792m-qgm2 , EUVD-2023-0491

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.7%
EPSS 1.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 77%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A regular expression based DoS vulnerability in Active Support <6.1.7.1 and <7.0.4.1. A specially crafted string passed to the underscore method can cause the regular expression engine to enter a state of catastrophic backtracking. This can cause the process to use large amounts of CPU and memory, leading to a possible DoS vulnerability.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems activesupport 6.1.7.1, 7.0.4.1
  • activesupport_project activesupport 6.1.7.1, 7.0.4.1
  • rails Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 2:6.1.7.3+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-22796

  • foreman satellite utils 6.14, satellite capsule 6.14, satellite 6.14 3.7.0.9-1.el8sat
  • foreman-cli satellite utils 6.14, satellite 6.14 3.7.0.9-1.el8sat
  • foreman-ec2 satellite 6.14 3.7.0.9-1.el8sat
  • rubygem-git satellite 6.14 1.18.0-1.el8sat
  • puppet-agent satellite capsule 6.14, satellite 6.14 7.26.0-3.el8sat
  • puppetserver satellite capsule 6.14, satellite 6.14 7.11.0-1.el8sat
  • rubygem-rack satellite capsule 6.14, satellite 6.14 2.2.7-1.el8sat
  • foreman-ovirt satellite 6.14 3.7.0.9-1.el8sat

red hat advisories RHSA-2023:6818

  • rubygem-activesupport-4_2 OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 9, OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 8 4.2.9-7.15.1
  • rubygem-activesupport-5_1 SLE High Availability Extension 15 SP4, SLE High Availability Extension 15 SP3, SLE High Availability Extension 15 SP2 +2 more 5.1.4-150000.3.12.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2023:0612-1SUSE-SU-2023:0275-1

  • rubygem-activesupport-7.0 openSUSE Tumbleweed 7.0.8.6-1.3
  • rubygem-activesupport-7.0 openSUSE Tumbleweed 7.0.8.4-1.1
  • rubygem-activesupport-7.0 openSUSE Tumbleweed 7.0.4.1-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2025:15114-1openSUSE-SU-2024:14071-1openSUSE-SU-2024:12767-1

  • ruby-activesupport Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +5 more 7.0.4.3-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2023-22796

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org 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-2023-22796 updated cvss 7.5

rubygem-activesupport: Regular Expression Denial of Service

  • Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform 2 3scale-amp2/backend-rhel8
    affected: no fix available
  • Red Hat Satellite 6.14 for RHEL 8 rubygem-activesupport 6.1.7.3-1.el8sat
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2023:6818
  • Red Hat RHOL 5.7 for RHEL 8 openshift-logging/fluentd-rhel8 v1.14.6-152
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2023:4341
  • Red Hat Satellite 6 candlepin, candlepin-selinux Red Hat Satellite 6.14 for RHEL 8 cjson 1.7.14-5.el8sat, katello 4.9.0-1.el8sat, libsolv 0.7.22-4.el8pc, libcomps 0.1.18-4.el8pc, python-idna 3.3-2.el8pc, candlepin 4.3.1-1.el8sat, +668 more Red Hat RHOL 5.7 for RHEL 8 openshift-logging/vector-rhel8 v0.28.1-6, openshift-logging/kibana6-rhel8 v6.8.1-377, openshift-logging/logging-loki-rhel8 v2.8.3-1, openshift-logging/eventrouter-rhel8 v0.4.0-153, openshift-logging/loki-rhel8-operator v5.7.4-6, openshift-logging/loki-operator-bundle v5.7.4-14, +11 more
    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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

1.71% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 77% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

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

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
rubygems activesupport
<6.1.7.1
>=7.0.0, <7.0.4.1
6.1.7.1
7.0.4.1

Affected products

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

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
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.