I don't know what the specific issue with pickle is, but ruby's Marshal format is pretty bulletproof at this point. It is a data only format with pretty strict

I don't know what the specific issue with pickle is, but ruby's Marshal format is pretty bulletproof at this point. It is a data only format with pretty strict verification of the stream as it builds the object tree. Also, Marshal doesn't allow any kind of code to be included into the stream, so there is no ability for stream to perform remote code injection. Marshal call back into Ruby for non-builtin types, but it does so by simply calling a method on the constant and passing either the raw Marshal data or a previous created object tree. This provides enough protection that there haven't been any reported cases of it being exploited and no know issues exist with it.