Every item contracted to clear before M7 is closed. 151 tests from 119,
58 corpus cases from 48, all six gates green.
Depth accounting (B3, B4). TAG_IVAR charged no depth at all, so an I-chain
of any length parsed under any ceiling. Proven end to end against a rebuilt
target image: a 12,936-byte cookie returned HTTP 500 with a SystemStackError
that no rescue StreamError can catch, and a 724,287-byte response body
leaking absolute container paths for every file in lib/. Fixed, the same
cookie returns 400 DepthLimitError, and so does a 53,340-byte one.
read_userdef also hard-coded a depth of 1 for its class-name slot.
Budget axes (B12, B13, B14). Bignum magnitude bypassed the scalar budget
entirely and the sign byte accepted anything as positive where Marshal.load
raises ArgumentError. Added max_symbol_references, max_symbol_name_bytes,
max_class_name_bytes, max_instance_variables and max_struct_members.
Parser.new now enforces Limits.new instead of resolving to an unbounded
config; Limits.permissive became a class method.
Hash-key dispatch (B11). Nothing rejected an allowlisted class used as a
hash KEY, where #hash and #eql? run during load before any allowlist can
act. Measured against real Marshal.load: a key dispatches iff it carries a
class name and its underlying value is not a T_STRING. So TAG_REGEXP is not
a key-position risk and TAG_USERCLASS only conditionally - rejecting either
outright would have been a false positive. No opt-out allowlist was added,
because the dispatch happens before any check could run.
Fidelity (B15, B16, B9). The parser already matched Marshal.load on header
versions, so the 4.8 contradiction was resolved by giving the detector the
policy check and leaving the forensic parser permissive. Class-name slots
now accept only a symbol, an ivar-wrapped symbol, or a symlink. Wrapper
tags C and e no longer take an object-table slot, which Ruby does not give
them - link index 3 resolved to "bbb" for us and "ccc" for Ruby.
Gate soundness (B6, B7). Three discarded check() return values now register
as failures; section 6 no longer reports a vacuous 0/0; section 7 requires
reachable > 0, and prism absence is a named failure rather than a silent
zero. version-matrix.sh exits non-zero when any image produces no probe
result. control_check.rb no longer pulls in minitest, which was printing
"0 runs, 0 assertions" directly under ALL CONTROLS PASSED. Rewrote the
vacuous tests: the regexp options byte had zero minitest coverage and its
mutant survived the whole suite, and read_count's negative guard was
alibied by take's own guard.
The target app (B5) lost its hand-rolled copy of the sink-plus-allowlist
policy and now runs one BoundaryDetector with real limits, branching on
rejected? rather than accepted?.
Everything here is mutation-proven. Notable misses that mutation caught:
B14 had no test at all until reverting it stayed green, and a struct-member
test was vacuous on the first attempt because struct member names are always
symbols.
lib/rube/marshal/parser.rb carries eight backlog items at once and cannot be
split without interactive hunk staging, so this is one commit rather than
eight.
Explanatory prose in puts statements is commentary living in code. Removed
from control_check.rb and render_matrix.rb, leaving facts and verdicts.
Controls now report as a uniform PASS/FAIL table with a single exit status,
which also makes them usable as a gate rather than something a human reads.
Records the resolution on the two third-party findings: both dropped, no
disclosure, no further investigation. Neither was independently verified, no
obligation attaches to unpublished observations, and the lab has a stronger
flagship in CVE-2026-41316. Kept as unverified leads in gitignored docs.
Probes six pinned Ruby images with no network and renders a compatibility
matrix for the deserialization gadget surface. Reproducible with just matrix.
The matrix carries three controls, because a table that reports one value
everywhere cannot be distinguished from a probe that always returns the same
answer. Two axes must show more than one state, and the ERB guard column is
cross-checked against the published CVE-2026-41316 affected ranges. That third
control is the load-bearing one: the probe reads source and knows nothing about
NVD, and it agrees with the advisory on 6 of 6 images.
Findings recorded in the research docs:
The gadget surface moved rather than shrank. Net::WriteAdapter is reachable at
baseline on Ruby 3.1 and 3.2 and gone from 3.3 onward, which is why vakzz-era
chains needed no preloaded net/http on old Ruby. Gem::URI appears in the same
release that took it away, and Gem::URI reached through an autoloaded
Gem::SpecFetcher is exactly the bootstrap the 2024 chain relies on. One door
closed and another opened in the same version, so a defense reasoning about
the known gadget classes is reasoning about a moving target.
The ERB @_init guard sits only on def_method. def_module and def_class delegate
to it in both vulnerable and patched releases, so one check covers all three.
The first probe measured all three independently and reported the delegates as
unguarded even on patched erb 6.0.1.1. That was the probe being wrong, not the
patch being incomplete, and it is corrected here.
Marshal stream format is 4.8 on every image, so the M1 parser applies across
the whole range unchanged. make and git are absent from every slim image, so
rake is the only exec binary present on that family.
CarterPerez-dev