Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the interpreter for the Ruby language, which may lead to denial of service and other security problems. 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 valid certificate issued by a trusted certification authority.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 1.9.2.0-2+deb6u1. For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 1.9.3.194-8.1+deb7u1. For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 1.9.3.194-8.2. We recommend that you upgrade your ruby1.9.1 packages.

Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in perl). It is simple, straight-forward, and extensible.

ruby1.9.1 on Debian Linux

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

• http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2738.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25