Bootstrap Sass Backdoor

05 Apr 2019

but if i were someone who wanted to put some malicious code into a LOT of rails projects this would be an opportune time to phish the authors of the bootstrap-sass gem – me on Slack, March 26, 2019 at 3:45PM

A little more than a week ago I found a backdoor in the bootstrap-sass gem. Liran Tal from Synk wrote a nice overview of the timeline of the vulnerability and the technical details involved.

I am not a security expert; however, as this situation shows, software engineers should have at least passing a “security sensibility” in order to do their jobs. I’ve seen comments asking, “did we get lucky”? I’m not sure it’s luck, unless you’re talking about our project using this particular version of this particular library. I hope that if it was someone else who encountered these circumstances, they would’ve acted similarly.

In any case, here’s what happened: One of the builds on an internal tool we’re developing failed unexpectedly. This is not great, but also not unusual. We saw that the version of bootstrap-sass the application depended on (3.2.0.2) wasn’t downloading from RubyGems. I checked and noticed it was yanked. Again, this isn’t unusual: stuff gets yanked from time to time. I saw that a newer version of the gem was released (3.2.0.3). I figured some sort of vulnerability was found or something, and was about to upgrade our Gemfile except

I couldn’t find 3.2.0.3 in the GitHub repo

I couldn’t find any mention of the version in any issues or changelogs

I couldn’t find any mention of the gem being yanked by the owners of the project

This last part bothered me the most, and that’s when I started to get suspicious. Why would the authors yank a gem and not mention it? Why would they publish a new version and also not mention it? You would think there’d be some sort of social trace if there were some sort of weird security or copyright issue or something, but I could find nothing.

So I downloaded the gem and poked around it; at this point I was just trying to figure out what the change was. There was a changelog entry in the gem, stating only Recompile with libsass . And yes, it’s true the ruby sass gem is now deprecated in favor of libsass , but that didn’t seem like a particularly great reason to yank a dependency and release such a huge change as a patch release. It was at this point that my curiosity escalated to alarm, leading to the Slack message introducing this post.

Thankfully bootstrap-sass is a very small gem, and I found the offending code pretty quickly with a crude and manual “diff”. The red herring of the CloudFlare-style cookie threw me off for a second; I was caught up in the the fact that the cookie had a key of ___cfduid , but it didn’t occur to me at the time that this was an intentional obfuscation. Regardless, I both filed the issue on GitHub as well as alerted RubyGems that something fishy was going on. The community was pretty quick to take action where they needed to, and everything was back to normal and surfaced as well as it could be (it looks like some auditing improvements have been filed with the RubyGems team).

One funny thing is that, when I look at the issue I created, in retrospect, I see that I didn’t call what’s clearly a backdoor exactly that. I think this is partially because I stopped analyzing once I realized something was strange, and tried to escalate things as quickly as possible, and partially because I couldn’t believe that such a popular gem had a backdoor in it.

Overall, I think this situation shows the importance of layered security. The attackers here didn’t gain access to the authors’ GitHub or Twitter accounts, which made the attack more suspicious and therefore that much weaker. This wasn’t an accidental or “lucky” situation–the circumstances around it were suspicious enough to warrant me auditing the code, which lead to the discovery. I don’t think this would prevent a more subtle attack (like an “inside job” situation), nor does it address the trend where knowing what’s in a project’s dependency tree is increasingly intractable, but maybe if we all spend the half-hour investigating something suspicious from our own perspective, we can all sleep (a little) easier.

Thanks to Mike Kendall for looking at a draft of this post.