From: jean.boussier@... Date: 2021-05-04T14:22:34+00:00 Subject: [ruby-core:103713] [Ruby master Feature#17837] Add support for Regexp timeouts Issue #17837 has been updated by byroot (Jean Boussier). > The main/major issue is it can trigger within ensure, right? Is there anything else? That would fix most issues, but not all. It can also trigger in places where exception are entirely unexpected, so there's just no `ensure`. Also I'm not clear on the details, but some C extensions (often various clients) can't be interrupted by `Thread#raise`. ---------------------------------------- Feature #17837: Add support for Regexp timeouts https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17837#change-91807 * Author: sam.saffron (Sam Saffron) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal ---------------------------------------- ### Background ReDoS are a very common security issue. At Discourse we have seen a few through the years. https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Regular_expression_Denial_of_Service_-_ReDoS In a nutshell there are 100s of ways this can happen in production apps, the key is for an attacker (or possibly innocent person) to supply either a problematic Regexp or a bad string to test it with. ``` /A(B|C+)+D/ =~ "A" + "C" * 100 + "X" ``` Having a problem Regexp somewhere in a large app is a universal constant, it will happen as long as you are using Regexps. Currently the only feasible way of supplying a consistent safeguard is by using `Thread.raise` and managing all execution. This kind of pattern requires usage of a third party implementation. There are possibly issues with jRuby and Truffle when taking approaches like this. ### Prior art .NET provides a `MatchTimeout` property per: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.regularexpressions.regex.matchtimeout?view=net-5.0 Java has nothing built in as far as I can tell: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/910740/cancelling-a-long-running-regex-match Node has nothing built in as far as I can tell: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38859506/cancel-regex-match-if-timeout Golang and Rust uses RE2 which is not vulnerable to DoS by limiting features (available in Ruby RE2 gem) ``` irb(main):003:0> r = RE2::Regexp.new('A(B|C+)+D') => # irb(main):004:0> r.match("A" + "C" * 100 + "X") => nil ``` ### Proposal Implement `Regexp.timeout` which allow us to specify a global timeout for all Regexp operations in Ruby. Per Regexp would require massive application changes, almost all web apps would do just fine with a 1 second Regexp timeout. If `timeout` is set to `nil` everything would work as it does today, when set to second a "monitor" thread would track running regexps and time them out according to the global value. ### Alternatives I recommend against a "per Regexp" API as this decision is at the application level. You want to apply it to all regular expressions in all the gems you are consuming. I recommend against a move to RE2 at the moment as way too much would break ### See also: https://people.cs.vt.edu/davisjam/downloads/publications/Davis-Dissertation-2020.pdf https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-regular-expression-denial-of-service-redos-cheat-sheet-a78d0ed7d865 -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ Unsubscribe: