Ruby: Denial of service — GLSA 200906-02

A flaw in the Ruby standard library might allow remote attackers to cause a Denial of Service attack.

Affected packages

dev-lang/ruby on all architectures
Affected versions < 1.8.6_p369
Unaffected versions >= 1.8.6_p369

Background

Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented programming language. The elaborate standard library includes the "BigDecimal" class.

Description

Tadayoshi Funaba reported that BigDecimal in ext/bigdecimal/bigdecimal.c does not properly handle string arguments containing overly long numbers.

Impact

A remote attacker could exploit this issue to remotely cause a Denial of Service attack.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Ruby users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-lang/ruby-1.8.6_p369"

References

Release date
June 28, 2009

Latest revision
June 28, 2009: 01

Severity
normal

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries