Mitigating Ruby YAML.load Universal RCE Deserialization Gadget with BIG-IP ASM

Recently a new YAML deserialization gadget was published that may lead to arbitrary code execution when deserialized by supplying it to Ruby's YAML.load function as input.

Prior to this new gadget it was known that calling YAML.load on user supplied input is a bad idea, but this was only relevant to applications that are based on the Ruby on Rails web framework. In this case the published gadget is universal, meaning it will only depend on the existence of classes that are shipped with the default installation of Ruby, and thus it will be able to execute code in any Ruby application that deserializes YAML documents using the YAML.load function.

Mitigating the vulnerability with BIG-IP ASM

BIG-IP ASM customers under any supported BIG-IP version are already protected against this vulnerability. The exploitation attempt will be detected by existing Ruby code injection attack signatures which can be found in signature sets that include the “Server Side Code Injection” attack type or “Ruby” System.

Figure 1:  Exploit blocked with attack signature 200004159

Additional Reading

https://staaldraad.github.io/post/2019-03-02-universal-rce-ruby-yaml-load/