Debian Security Advisory DSA 2809-1 (ruby1.8 - several vulnerabilities)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the interpreter for the Ruby language. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems: CVE-2013-1821 Ben Murphy discovered that unrestricted entity expansion in REXML can lead to a Denial of Service by consuming all host memory. CVE-2013-4073 William (B.J.) Snow Orvis discovered a vulnerability in the hostname checking in Ruby's SSL client that could allow man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via a crafted certificate issued by a trusted certification authority. CVE-2013-4164 Charlie Somerville discovered that Ruby incorrectly handled floating point number conversion. If an application using Ruby accepted untrusted input strings and converted them to floating point numbers, an attacker able to provide such input could cause the application to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the application.

ruby1.8 on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 1.8.7.302-2squeeze2. For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 1.8.7.358-7.1+deb7u1. For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 1.8.7.358-9. We recommend that you upgrade your ruby1.8 packages.