Vulnerabilities

Ratpack is a toolkit for creating web applications. In versions prior to 1.9.0, a malicious attacker can achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) via a maliciously crafted Java deserialization gadget chain leveraged against the Ratpack session store. If one's application does not use Ratpack's session mechanism, it is not vulnerable. Ratpack 1.9.0 introduces a strict allow-list mechanism that mitigates this vulnerability when used. Two possible workarounds exist. The simplest mitigation for users of earlier versions is to reduce the likelihood of attackers being able to write to the session data store. Alternatively or additionally, the allow-list mechanism could be manually back ported by providing an alternative implementation of `SessionSerializer` that uses an allow-list.

All versions of io.ratpack:ratpack-core from 0.9.10 inclusive and before 1.7.6 are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS). This affects the development mode error handler when an exception message contains untrusted data. Note the production mode error handler is not vulnerable - so for this to be utilized in production it would require users to not disable development mode.

An issue was discovered in Ratpack before 1.7.5. Due to a misuse of the Netty library class DefaultHttpHeaders, there is no validation that headers lack HTTP control characters. Thus, if untrusted data is used to construct HTTP headers with Ratpack, HTTP Response Splitting can occur.

Ratpack versions before 1.6.1 generate a session ID using a cryptographically weak PRNG in the JDK's ThreadLocalRandom. This means that if an attacker can determine a small window for the server start time and obtain a session ID value, they can theoretically determine the sequence of session IDs.