Nested attributes rejection proc bypass in Active Record

There is a vulnerability in how the nested attributes feature in Active Record
handles updates in combination with destroy flags when destroying records is
disabled. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2015-7577.

Versions Affected: 3.1.0 and newer
Not affected: 3.0.x and older
Fixed Versions: 5.0.0.beta1.1, 4.2.5.1, 4.1.14.1, 3.2.22.1

Impact

When using the nested attributes feature in Active Record you can prevent the
destruction of associated records by passing the allow_destroy: false option
to the accepts_nested_attributes_for method. However due to a change in the
commit a9b4b5d the _destroy flag prevents the :reject_if proc from
being called because it assumes that the record will be destroyed anyway.

However this isn’t true if :allow_destroy is false so this leads to changes
that would have been rejected being applied to the record. Attackers could use
this do things like set attributes to invalid values and to clear all of the
attributes amongst other things. The severity will be dependent on how the
application has used this feature.

All users running an affected release should either upgrade or use one of
the workarounds immediately.

Releases

The FIXED releases are available at the normal locations.

Workarounds

If you can’t upgrade, please use the following monkey patch in an initializer
that is loaded before your application:

$ cat config/initializers/nested_attributes_bypass_fix.rb
module ActiveRecord
  module NestedAttributes
    private

    def reject_new_record?(association_name, attributes)
      will_be_destroyed?(association_name, attributes) || call_reject_if(association_name, attributes)
    end

    def call_reject_if(association_name, attributes)
      return false if will_be_destroyed?(association_name, attributes)

      case callback = self.nested_attributes_options[association_name][:reject_if]
      when Symbol
        method(callback).arity == 0 ? send(callback) : send(callback, attributes)
      when Proc
        callback.call(attributes)
      end
    end

    def will_be_destroyed?(association_name, attributes)
      allow_destroy?(association_name) && has_destroy_flag?(attributes)
    end

    def allow_destroy?(association_name)
      self.nested_attributes_options[association_name][:allow_destroy]
    end
  end
end

Patches

To aid users who aren’t able to upgrade immediately we have provided patches for
the two supported release series. They are in git-am format and consist of a
single changeset.

• 3-2-nested-attributes-reject-if-bypass.patch - Patch for 3.2 series
• 4-1-nested-attributes-reject-if-bypass.patch - Patch for 4.1 series
• 4-2-nested-attributes-reject-if-bypass.patch - Patch for 4.2 series
• 5-0-nested-attributes-reject-if-bypass.patch - Patch for 5.0 series

Please note that only the 4.1.x and 4.2.x series are supported at present. Users
of earlier unsupported releases are advised to upgrade as soon as possible as we
cannot guarantee the continued availability of security fixes for unsupported
releases.

Credits

Thank you to Justin Coyne for reporting the problem and working with us to fix it.