Ruby: Multiple vulnerabilities — GLSA 200812-17

Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Ruby that allow for attacks including arbitrary code execution and Denial of Service.

Affected packages

Package	dev-lang/ruby on all architectures
Affected versions	< 1.8.6_p287-r1
Unaffected versions	>= 1.8.6_p287-r1

Background

Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented programming language. The elaborate standard library includes an HTTP server ("WEBRick") and a class for XML parsing ("REXML").

Description

Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Ruby interpreter and its standard libraries. Drew Yao of Apple Product Security discovered the following flaws:

Arbitrary code execution or Denial of Service (memory corruption) in the rb_str_buf_append() function (CVE-2008-2662).
Arbitrary code execution or Denial of Service (memory corruption) in the rb_ary_stor() function (CVE-2008-2663).
Memory corruption via alloca in the rb_str_format() function (CVE-2008-2664).
Memory corruption ("REALLOC_N") in the rb_ary_splice() and rb_ary_replace() functions (CVE-2008-2725).
Memory corruption ("beg + rlen") in the rb_ary_splice() and rb_ary_replace() functions (CVE-2008-2726).

Furthermore, several other vulnerabilities have been reported:

Tanaka Akira reported an issue with resolv.rb that enables attackers to spoof DNS responses (CVE-2008-1447).
Akira Tagoh of RedHat discovered a Denial of Service (crash) issue in the rb_ary_fill() function in array.c (CVE-2008-2376).
Several safe level bypass vulnerabilities were discovered and reported by Keita Yamaguchi (CVE-2008-3655).
Christian Neukirchen is credited for discovering a Denial of Service (CPU consumption) attack in the WEBRick HTTP server (CVE-2008-3656).
A fault in the dl module allowed the circumvention of taintness checks which could possibly lead to insecure code execution was reported by "sheepman" (CVE-2008-3657).
Tanaka Akira again found a DNS spoofing vulnerability caused by the resolv.rb implementation using poor randomness (CVE-2008-3905).
Luka Treiber and Mitja Kolsek (ACROS Security) disclosed a Denial of Service (CPU consumption) vulnerability in the REXML module when dealing with recursive entity expansion (CVE-2008-3790).

Impact

These vulnerabilities allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, spoof DNS responses, bypass Ruby's built-in security and taintness checks, and cause a Denial of Service via crash or CPU exhaustion.

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_p287-r1"

References

Release date
December 16, 2008

Latest revision
December 16, 2008: 01

Severity
normal

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries