What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2013-1856

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.8 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2013-03-19 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

The ActiveSupport::XmlMini_JDOM backend in lib/active_support/xml_mini/jdom.rb in the Active Support component in Ruby on Rails 3.0.x and 3.1.x before 3.1.12 and 3.2.x before 3.2.13, when JRuby is used, does not properly restrict the capabilities of the XML parser, which allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files or cause a denial of service (resource consumption) via vectors involving (1) an external DTD or (2) an external entity declaration in conjunction with an entity reference.

Affected products

• Ruby on Rails: 3.1.0, 3.1.0-beta1, 3.1.0-rc1, 3.1.0-rc2, 3.1.0-rc3, 3.1.0-rc4 (+40)
• rubyonrails Ruby On Rails: 3.1.11

References

• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2013/Jun/msg00000.html
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2013/Oct/msg00006.html
• http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5784
• http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2013/3/18/SEC-ANN-Rails-3-2-13-3-1-12-and-2-3-18-have-been-released/
• https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-security/msg/6c2482d4ed1545e6?dmode=source&output=gplain
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2013/Jun/msg00000.html
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2013/Oct/msg00006.html
• http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5784
• http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2013/3/18/SEC-ANN-Rails-3-2-13-3-1-12-and-2-3-18-have-been-released/
• https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-security/msg/6c2482d4ed1545e6?dmode=source&output=gplain

Get alerted when CVE-2013-1856 or the next vulnerability affects your stack