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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2014-6438 json

The URI.decode_www_form_component method in Ruby before 1.9.2-p330 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (catastrophic regul…

published 2017-09-06 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2014-6318

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
4.1%
EPSS 4.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 90%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The URI.decode_www_form_component method in Ruby before 1.9.2-p330 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (catastrophic regular expression backtracking, resource consumption, or application crash) via a crafted string.

Patch / fix

  • ruby4.0 hummingbird 1 4.0.0-33.3.hum1
  • ruby4.0-libs hummingbird 1 4.0.0-33.3.hum1
  • ruby4.0-bundled-gems hummingbird 1 4.0.0-33.3.hum1
  • ruby4.0-default-gems hummingbird 1 4.0.0-33.3.hum1
  • ruby3.3 hummingbird 1 3.3.10-23.1.hum1
  • ruby3.3-libs hummingbird 1 3.3.10-23.1.hum1
  • ruby3.3-bundled-gems hummingbird 1 3.3.10-23.1.hum1
  • ruby3.3-default-gems hummingbird 1 3.3.10-23.1.hum1

red hat advisories RHSA-2026:8838RHSA-2026:7305RHSA-2026:7307

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2014-6438 updated cvss 7.5

ruby: Unsafe parsing of long strings via decode_www_form_component method

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 ruby Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 ruby, ruby-ri, ruby-irb, ruby-libs, ruby-rdoc, ruby-tcltk
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Hardened Images ruby3.4 3.4.8-31.1.hum1, ruby4.0 4.0.0-33.3.hum1, ruby3.3 3.3.10-23.1.hum1, ruby3.4-libs 3.4.8-31.1.hum1, ruby4.0-libs 4.0.0-33.3.hum1, ruby3.3-libs 3.3.10-23.1.hum1, +6 more
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2026:7305
  • Red Hat CloudForms Management Engine 5 ruby-200-ruby, rh-ruby22-ruby Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ruby, ruby-irb, rubygems, ruby-libs, ruby-tcltk, rubygem-json, +6 more Red Hat Hardened Images rubygem3.3-rbs 3.4.0-23.1.hum1, rubygem3.3-rss 0.3.1-23.1.hum1, rubygem3.4-rbs 3.8.0-31.1.hum1, rubygem3.4-rss 0.3.1-31.1.hum1, rubygem4.0-rss 0.3.2-33.3.hum1, rubygem3.3-irb 1.13.1-23.1.hum1, +45 more Red Hat Software Collections rh-ruby22-ruby, rh-ruby23-ruby, rh-ruby24-ruby, rh-ruby22-ruby-irb, rh-ruby22-rubygems, rh-ruby23-ruby-irb, +41 more Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager ruby193-ruby
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

4.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 90% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-399 Resource Management Errors

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.