Also, more than other communities, Ruby has a cultural gap between the people developing the language and core libraries and the people using it to write web apps and frameworks.

Here's two good technical writeups of the exploit as it applies to Rails apps: http://blog.codeclimate.com/blog/2013/01/10/rails-remote-cod... http://ronin-ruby.github.com/blog/2013/01/09/rails-pocs.html

My point is that it's 'taken so long' because all this code is stuff that was written in a totally different time and place. And then was built on top of, after years and years and years.

Now that it _is_ being examined, that's why you see some many advisories. This is a good thing, not a bad one! It's all being looked through and taken care of.

And then, as someone else said, becuase of layering. The next downstream user using YAML might not have even realized that YAML had this feature, on top of not realizing the danger of this feature. And then someone else downstream of THAT library, etc.

Maybe it _should_ have been obvious, but it wasn't, as evidenced, as you say, by all the people who have done it before. After the FIRST time it was discovered, it should have been obvious, why did it happen even a second?

In part, becuase for whatever reason, none of those exploits got the (negative) publicity that the rails/yaml one is getting. Hopefully it (the dangers of serialization formats allowing arbitrary class/type de-serialization) WILL become obvious to competent developers NOW, but it was not before.

20 years ago, you could write code thinking that giving untrusted user input to it was a _special case_. "Well, I guess, now that you mention it, if you give untrusted input that may have been constructed by an attacker to this function it would be dangerous, but why/how would anyone do that?" Things have changed. There's a lot more code where you should be assuming that passing untrusted input to it will be done, unless you specifically and loudly document not to. But we're still using a lot of code written under the assumptions of 20 years ago -- assumptions that were not neccesarily wrong cost/benefit analyses 20 years ago. And yeah, some people are still WRITING code under the security assumptions of 20 years ago too, oops.

At the same time, we have a LOT MORE code _sharing_ than we had 20 years ago. (internet open source has changed the way software is written, drastically) And ruby community is especially 'advanced' at code sharing, using each other's code as dependencies in a complex multi-generation dependency graph. That greatly increases the danger of unexpected interactions of features creating security exploits that would not have been predicted by looking at any part in isolation. But we couldn't accomplish what we have all accomplished without using other people's open source code as more-or-less black box building blocks for our own, we can't do a full security audit of all of our dependencies (and our dependencies' dependencies etc).

Of course, you could argue that developers should always be thinking about and searching for security related issues in whatever field they're working in, but that doesn't appear to be the norm at the moment.

I thought you could unpickle untrusted input in Python? Sure there's a great big red warning message on the documentation, and hence it's currently rare for people to do it, but it is technically allowed, right?