What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-0752: Ruby on Rails Directory Traversal Vulnerability

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2022-03-25
• EPSS: 95.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2016-02-16 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-22

Description

Directory traversal vulnerability in Action View in Ruby on Rails before 3.2.22.1, 4.0.x and 4.1.x before 4.1.14.1, 4.2.x before 4.2.5.1, and 5.x before 5.0.0.beta1.1 allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files by leveraging an application's unrestricted use of the render method and providing a .. (dot dot) in a pathname.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 8.0
• openSUSE Leap: 42.1
• Opensuse: 13.2
• RedHat Software Collections: 1.0
• Ruby on Rails: before 3.2.22.1; from 4.0.0 before 4.1.14.1; from 4.2.0 before 4.2.5.1; 5.0.0-beta1 — fixed in 3.2.22.1, 4.1.14.1, 4.2.5.1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Module For Containers: 12

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Ruby on Rails 3.2.22.1, 4.1.14.1, 4.2.5.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2016-February/178044.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2016-February/178069.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2016-04/msg00053.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2016-02/msg00034.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2016-02/msg00043.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-0296.html
• http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3464
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/01/25/13
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/81801
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1034816
• https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=ruby-security-ann/335P1DcLG00/JXcBnTtZEgAJ
• https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/40561/

Get alerted when CVE-2016-0752 or the next vulnerability affects your stack