RHSA-2013:0129 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated ruby packages that fix two security issues and one bug are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate
security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores,
which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability
from the CVE links in the References section.

Description

Ruby is an extensible, interpreted, object-oriented, scripting language. It
has features to process text files and to do system management tasks.

It was found that certain methods did not sanitize file names before
passing them to lower layer routines in Ruby. If a Ruby application created
files with names based on untrusted input, it could result in the creation
of files with different names than expected. (CVE-2012-4522)

It was found that the RHSA-2011:0909 update did not correctly fix the
CVE-2011-1005 issue, a flaw in the method for translating an exception
message into a string in the Exception class. A remote attacker could use
this flaw to bypass safe level 4 restrictions, allowing untrusted (tainted)
code to modify arbitrary, trusted (untainted) strings, which safe level 4
restrictions would otherwise prevent. (CVE-2012-4481)

The CVE-2012-4481 issue was discovered by Vit Ondruch of Red Hat.

This update also fixes the following bug:

• Prior to this update, the "rb_syck_mktime" option could, under certain

circumstances, terminate with a segmentation fault when installing
libraries with certain gems. This update modifies the underlying code so
that Ruby gems can be installed as expected. (BZ#834381)

All users of Ruby are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to resolve these issues.

Solution

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/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 863484 - CVE-2012-4481 ruby: Incomplete fix for CVE-2011-1005 for NameError#to_s method when used on objects
• BZ - 865940 - CVE-2012-4522 ruby: unintentional file creation caused by inserting an illegal NUL character

CVEs

• CVE-2012-4481
• CVE-2012-4522

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
• https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0909.html