What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-5257: Sort order SQL injection in Administrate

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-03-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-943

Description

In Administrate (rubygem) before version 0.13.0, when sorting by attributes on a dashboard, the direction parameter was not validated before being interpolated into the SQL query. This could present a SQL injection if the attacker were able to modify the `direction` parameter and bypass ActiveRecord SQL protections. Whilst this does have a high-impact, to exploit this you need access to the Administrate dashboards, which we would expect to be behind authentication. This is patched in wersion 0.13.0.

Affected products

• administrate: before 0.13.0 — fixed in 0.13.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: administrate 0.13.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/commit/3ab838b83c5f565fba50e0c6f66fe4517f98eed3
• https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/security/advisories/GHSA-2p5p-m353-833w
• https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/commit/3ab838b83c5f565fba50e0c6f66fe4517f98eed3
• https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/security/advisories/GHSA-2p5p-m353-833w

Get alerted when CVE-2020-5257 or the next vulnerability affects your stack