websocket-driver: Memory exhaustion via abuse of protocol length headers

Impact

The frame format in draft versions of the WebSocket protocol includes a length header that allows an arbitrarily large integer to be encoded as a sequence of bytes with the high bit set. By sending an indefinite sequence of bytes with values 0x80 or above, a server or client can make the other peer parse these bytes into an ever-growing integer. Since Ruby integers are arbitrary precision, this can be used to make a WebSocket connection consume an unbounded amount of memory and lead to the host process running out of memory.

Patches

The issue has been patched in version 0.8.1. All users should upgrade to this version.

Workarounds

No known workarounds exist.

Acknowledgements

This issue was discovered and reported by Pranjali Thakur, DepthFirst Security Research Team.