Cyber Posture

CVE-2025-27220

Medium

Published: 04 March 2025

Published
04 March 2025
Modified
03 November 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score 4.0 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:L
EPSS Score 0.0025 47.8th percentile
Risk Priority 8 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Description

Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.

Security Summary

CVE-2025-27220 is a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability in the Util#escapeElement method of the CGI gem for Ruby, affecting versions before 0.4.2. Published on 2025-03-04, it is classified under CWE-1333 and carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 4.0 (AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:L).

Remote attackers require no privileges or user interaction to exploit this over the network, though the attack demands high complexity. Exploitation triggers excessive resource consumption via malicious regular expression input, resulting in low-impact availability disruption with a changed scope.

Advisories recommend upgrading the CGI gem to version 0.4.2 or later for mitigation. Key references include the Ruby Advisory Database entry at https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db/blob/master/gems/cgi/CVE-2025-27220.yml, a HackerOne disclosure report at https://hackerone.com/reports/2890322, and a Debian LTS announcement at https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/03/msg00008.html.

Details

CWE(s)
CWE-1333

Affected Products

ruby-lang
cgi
0.3.6 · ≤ 0.3.5.1 · 0.4.0 — 0.4.2

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood Impact
Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.
Why these techniques?

ReDoS vulnerability in CGI gem's Util#escapeElement enables resource exhaustion (CPU) via malicious regex input, facilitating Application Exhaustion Flood.

References