Red Hat Update: RHSA-2011:1581-03 Addresses Ruby Security Vulnerability

Ruby is an extensible, interpreted, object-oriented, scripting language. It has features to process text files and to do system management tasks.
It was found that Ruby did not reinitialize the PRNG (pseudorandom number generator) after forking a child process. This could eventually lead to the PRNG returning the same result twice. An attacker keeping track of the values returned by one child process could use this flaw to predict the values the PRNG would return in other child processes (as long as the parent process persisted). (CVE-2011-3009)
A flaw was found in the Ruby SecureRandom module. When using the SecureRandom.random_bytes class, the PRNG state was not modified after forking a child process. This could eventually lead to SecureRandom.random_bytes returning the same string more than once. An attacker keeping track of the strings returned by one child process could use this flaw to predict the strings SecureRandom.random_bytes would return in other child processes (as long as the parent process persisted). (CVE-2011-2705)
This update also fixes the following bugs:
* The ruby package has been upgraded to upstream point release 1.8.7-p352, which provides a number of bug fixes over the previous version. (BZ#706332)
* The MD5 message-digest algorithm is not a FIPS-approved algorithm. Consequently, when a Ruby script attempted to calculate an MD5 checksum in FIPS mode, the interpreter terminated unexpectedly. This bug has been fixed and an exception is now raised in the described scenario. (BZ#717709)
* Due to inappropriately handled line continuations in the mkconfig.rb source file, an attempt to build the ruby package resulted in unexpected termination. An upstream patch has been applied to address this issue and the ruby package can now be built properly. (BZ#730287)
* When the 32-bit ruby-libs library was installed on a 64-bit machine, the mkmf library failed to load various modules necessary for building Ruby-related packages. This bug has been fixed and mkmf now works properly in the described scenario. (BZ#674787)
* Previously, the load paths for scripts and binary modules were duplicated on the i386 architecture. Consequently, an ActiveSupport test failed. With this update, the load paths are no longer stored in duplicates on the i386 architecture. (BZ#722887)
This update also adds the following enhancement:
* With this update, SystemTap probes have been added to the ruby package. (BZ#673162)
All users of ruby are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which resolve these issues and add this enhancement.