There's a possible information leak / session hijack vulnerability in Rack. Attackers may be able to find and hijack sessions by using timing attacks targeting the session id. Session ids are usually stored and indexed in a database that uses some kind of scheme for speeding up lookups of that session id. By carefully measuring the amount of time it takes to look up a session, an attacker may be able to find a valid session id and hijack the session.
The session id itself may be generated randomly, but the way the session is indexed by the backing store does not use a secure comparison.
Impact
The session id stored in a cookie is the same id that is used when querying the backing session storage engine. Most storage mechanisms (for example a database) use some sort of indexing in order to speed up the lookup of that id. By carefully timing requests and session lookup failures, an attacker may be able to perform a timing attack to determine an existing session id and hijack that session.
Releases
The 1.6.12 and 2.0.8 releases are available at the normal locations.
Workarounds
There are no known workarounds.
Patches
To aid users who aren't able to upgrade immediately we have provided patches for
the two supported release series. They are in git-am format and consist of a
single changeset.
- 1-6-session-timing-attack.patch - Patch for 1.6 series
- 2-0-session-timing-attack.patch - Patch for 2.6 series
Credits
Thanks Will Leinweber for reporting this!
References
will Analyst
There's a possible information leak / session hijack vulnerability in Rack. Attackers may be able to find and hijack sessions by using timing attacks targeting the session id. Session ids are usually stored and indexed in a database that uses some kind of scheme for speeding up lookups of that session id. By carefully measuring the amount of time it takes to look up a session, an attacker may be able to find a valid session id and hijack the session.
The session id itself may be generated randomly, but the way the session is indexed by the backing store does not use a secure comparison.
Impact
The session id stored in a cookie is the same id that is used when querying the backing session storage engine. Most storage mechanisms (for example a database) use some sort of indexing in order to speed up the lookup of that id. By carefully timing requests and session lookup failures, an attacker may be able to perform a timing attack to determine an existing session id and hijack that session.
Releases
The 1.6.12 and 2.0.8 releases are available at the normal locations.
Workarounds
There are no known workarounds.
Patches
To aid users who aren't able to upgrade immediately we have provided patches for
the two supported release series. They are in git-am format and consist of a
single changeset.
Credits
Thanks Will Leinweber for reporting this!
References