Ruby: Denial of service

Background

Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented programming language. The elaborate standard library includes the “BigDecimal” class.

Description

Tadayoshi Funaba reported that BigDecimal in ext/bigdecimal/bigdecimal.c does not properly handle string arguments containing overly long numbers.

Impact

A remote attacker could exploit this issue to remotely cause a Denial of Service attack.

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-1.8.6_p369"