Charlie Somerville discovered that Ruby incorrectly handled floating point number conversion. If an application using Ruby accepted untrusted input strings and converted them to floating point numbers, an attacker able to provide such input could cause the application to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the application.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 1.9.2.0-2+deb6u2. For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 1.9.3.194-8.1+deb7u2. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 1.9.3.484-1. 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-2810.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25