CVE-2016-10522

Vulnerability

rails_admin, a Rails engine providing an administrative interface for data management, is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks in all versions prior to 1.1.1. The CSRF protection does not validate tokens for HTTP methods other than GET, leaving endpoints reachable via POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE requests unprotected. This affects any application using the vulnerable gem with default configurations [1], [2].

Exploitation

An attacker can craft a malicious webpage or link that, when visited by an authenticated administrator, performs an unintended action on the rails_admin interface. The attacker requires no special network position beyond delivering the forged request to the victim's browser; the call will carry the victim's session cookie and succeed because the CSRF token is not checked. No prior authentication is needed — the exploit relies on the victim's existing authenticated session [1], [4].

Impact

Successful exploitation allows an attacker to perform arbitrary administrative actions on behalf of the victim, potentially leading to data modification, deletion, or privilege escalation within the application managed by rails_admin. The impact is high because administrative endpoints can modify sensitive data, user roles, or system configuration [2], [4].

Mitigation

Upgrade to rails_admin version 1.1.1 or later, released as part of the RailsAdmin gem, where CSRF protection properly validates tokens for all non-GET methods. No effective workaround is documented for earlier versions, so applying the update is strongly advised. The advisory is also tracked in the Ruby Advisory Database and GitHub Advisory Database [2], [4].