Mandriva Linux Security Advisory 2014-225

Mandriva Linux Security Advisory 2014-225 – Will Wood discovered that Ruby incorrectly handled the encodes() function. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause Ruby to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. The default compiler options for affected releases should reduce the vulnerability to a denial of service. Due to an incomplete fix for 100% CPU utilization can occur as a result of recursive expansion with an empty String. When reading text nodes from an XML document, the REXML parser in Ruby can be coerced into allocating extremely large string objects which can consume all of the memory on a machine, causing a denial of service. Additionally ruby has been upgraded to patch level 374.

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