The HTTP/XMLRPC server in Ruby before 1.8.2 uses blocking sockets, which allows attackers to cause a denial of service (blocked connections) via a large amount of data.

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the interpreter for the Ruby language, which may lead to the bypass of security restrictions or denial of service. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems :

  - CVE-2006-1931     It was discovered that the use of blocking sockets can     lead to denial of service.

  - CVE-2006-3964     It was discovered that Ruby does not properly maintain     'safe levels' for aliasing, directory accesses and     regular expressions, which might lead to a bypass of     security restrictions.

Updated ruby packages that fix a denial of service issue are now available.

This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language for object-oriented programming.

A bug was found in the way Ruby creates its xmlrpc and http servers.
The servers use a non blocking socket, which enables a remote user to cause a denial of service condition if they are able to transmit a large volume of information from the network server. (CVE-2006-1931)

Users of Ruby should update to these erratum packages, which contain a backported patch and are not vulnerable to this issue.

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-200605-11 (Ruby: Denial of Service)

    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.

Yukihiro Matsumoto reported that Ruby's HTTP module uses blocking sockets. By sending large amounts of data to a server application that uses this module, a remote attacker could exploit this to render this application unusable and not respond any more to other clients (Denial of Service).

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

A vulnerability in how ruby's HTTP module uses blocking sockets was reported by Yukihiro Matsumoto. By sending large amounts of data to a server application using this module, a remote attacker could exploit it to render the application unusable and not respond to other client requests.

The updated packages have been patched to fix this problem.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
22699	Debian DSA-1157-1 : ruby1.8 - several vulnerabilities	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	medium
21995	CentOS 4 : ruby (CESA-2006:0427)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	medium
21366	RHEL 4 : ruby (RHSA-2006:0427)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	medium
21353	GLSA-200605-11 : Ruby: Denial of Service	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	medium
21292	Ubuntu 4.10 / 5.04 / 5.10 : ruby1.8 vulnerability (USN-273-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	medium
21285	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : ruby (MDKSA-2006:079)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2006-1931

high

Tenable Plugins

medium

medium

medium

medium

medium

medium