Puppet » Facter

The vendored plist parser can (and will) segfault when fed valid OSX plists because it attempts to interpret the contents of data tags using Marshal. In no case does the Marshal process presently produce valid results; we always/only care about the result produced by the rescue clause in the cases where it doesn’t segfault.

Simplifying the code to never call Marshal:

diff --git a/lib/facter/util/plist/parser.rb b/lib/facter/util/plist/parser.rb
index 48e1034..61d0a3e 100644
--- a/lib/facter/util/plist/parser.rb
+++ b/lib/facter/util/plist/parser.rb
@@ -209,16 +209,7 @@ module Plist
     require 'base64'
     class PData < PTag
         def to_ruby
-            data = Base64.decode64(text.gsub(/\s+/, ''))
-
-            begin
-                return Marshal.load(data)
-            rescue Exception => e
-                io = StringIO.new
-                io.write data
-                io.rewind
-                return io
-            end
+            StringIO.new(Base64.decode64(text.gsub(/\s+/, '')))
         end
     end
 end

…gives us the same results but without the segfaults.