Synopsis

Moderate: rubygem-passenger security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Moderate

Topic

Updated rubygem-passenger packages that fix two security issues are now
available for Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 1.2.2.

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

rubygem-passenger is a web server for Ruby, Python and Node.js
applications.

The rubygem-passenger gem created and re-used temporary directories and
files in an insecure fashion. A local attacker could use these flaws to
conduct a denial of service attack, take over the operation of the
application or, potentially, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of
the user running rubygem-passenger. (CVE-2013-2119, CVE-2013-4136)

Note: By default, OpenShift Enterprise uses polyinstantiation (per user)
for the /tmp/ directory, thereby minimizing the risk and impact of
exploitation by local attackers of both CVE-2013-2119 and CVE-2013-4136.

The CVE-2013-2119 issue was discovered by Michael Scherer of the Red Hat
Regional IT team.

The following packages are included with this update as dependencies of the
updated Ruby 1.8 passenger packages:

rubygem-spruz-0.2.5-4.el6op
rubygem-file-tail-1.0.5-4.el6op

Users of Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 1.2.2 are advised to upgrade to
these updated packages, which correct these issues. After installing the
updated packages, manual action is required before the update takes effect.
Refer to the Solution section for details.

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/site/articles/11258

Manual action is required for this update to take effect. In order for the
updated passenger packages to be loaded by Ruby applications in the PaaS,
the applications must be restarted with oo-admin-ctl-gears. One way to
accomplish this is by running the following command, as a single line
without the line break, on all OpenShift Nodes:

for rubyapp in `ls -d /var/lib/openshift/*/ruby |
cut -f5 -d/`; do oo-admin-ctl-gears restartgear $rubyapp; done

If there are no Ruby applications on a Node it will simply fail with the
message "No such file or directory". Another option is to run the
following on all OpenShift Nodes; however, it will result in non-Ruby
applications also being restarted:

oo-admin-ctl-gears restartall

(Note that without the manual action, if a user attempts to restart their
Ruby application via the rhc command line, it will fail to start with a
"Passenger could not be initialized..." error.)

Affected Products

• Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise Infrastructure 1.2 x86_64
• Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise Application Node 1.2 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 892813 - CVE-2013-2119 rubygem-passenger: incorrect temporary file usage
• BZ - 985633 - CVE-2013-4136 rubygem-passenger: insecure temporary directory usage due to reuse of existing server instance directories

CVEs

• CVE-2013-2119
• CVE-2013-4136

References