Gempocalypse

RubyGems.org Vulnerability Explained

After evaluating Gemfury’s processing of RubyGems, we feel it is important to share our understanding and bring awareness to possible security issues when parsing untrusted YAML input.

On January 30, 2013, the community package server RubyGems.org was compromised with a rogue code execution vulnerability. The all-volunteer team sprung to action and in the following 53 hours yanked the expoit, patched the vulnerability, verified all the existing gems, and migrated the service to AWS. As of today, the service has been restored and deemed safe for use.