Ruby: Denial of service

Background

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It comes bundled with HTTP (“WEBrick”) and XMLRPC server objects.

Description

Ruby uses blocking sockets for WEBrick and XMLRPC servers.

Impact

An attacker could send large amounts of data to an affected server to block the socket and thus deny other connections to the server.

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-1.8.4-r1"