Moderate: ruby security update
Security Advisory: Moderate
Updated ruby packages that fix one security issue are now available for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate
security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score,
which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in
the References section.
Ruby is an extensible, interpreted, object-oriented, scripting language. It
has features to process text files and to do system management tasks.
A denial of service flaw was found in the implementation of associative
arrays (hashes) in Ruby. An attacker able to supply a large number of
inputs to a Ruby application (such as HTTP POST request parameters sent to
a web application) that are used as keys when inserting data into an array
could trigger multiple hash function collisions, making array operations
take an excessive amount of CPU time. To mitigate this issue, randomization
has been added to the hash function to reduce the chance of an attacker
successfully causing intentional collisions. (CVE-2011-4815)
Red Hat would like to thank oCERT for reporting this issue. oCERT
acknowledges Julian Wälde and Alexander Klink as the original reporters.
All users of ruby are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain a backported patch to resolve this issue.
Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.
This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259