MCP Ruby SDK: Unbounded line buffer in stdio transports leads to memory exhaustion (DoS)
Summary
The stdio transports in MCP::Server::Transports::StdioTransport and MCP::Client::Stdio read newline-delimited JSON-RPC frames using IO#gets with no limit argument. CRuby's IO#gets with no limit reads from the current position until the next separator (\n) with no upper bound on the returned string length. A peer that streams bytes without ever emitting a newline causes gets to accumulate the entire stream in a single Ruby String until the process is killed by the operating-system OOM killer.
This is the same vulnerability class tracked in sibling MCP SDKs as GHSA-74gp-qhv5-v493 (Kotlin), GHSA-wqgc-pwpr-pq7r (TypeScript), GHSA-655q-2283-6jgj (Python), and others. It was identified during a cross-SDK audit; ruby-sdk had no prior report.
Affected code
Verified at main @ cf44475c.
Server transport — lib/mcp/server/transports/stdio_transport.rb
# line 23
while @open && (line = $stdin.gets) #