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Uncontrolled Recursion in libxml2

CVE-2025-9714

  • libxml2
  • libxml
  • libxmljs
  • libxml2-nodejs
  • lxml
Severity Medium
Score 5.5/10

Summary

Uncontrolled recursion in XPath evaluation in libxml2 versions through 2.9.14 allow a local attacker to cause a Stack Overflow via crafted expressions. XPath processing functions `xmlXPathRunEval`, `xmlXPathCtxtCompile`, and `xmlXPathEvalExpr` were resetting recursion depth to zero before making potentially recursive calls. When such functions were called recursively this could allow for uncontrolled recursion and lead to a Stack Overflow. These functions now preserve recursion depth across recursive calls, allowing recursion depth to be controlled.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-674 - Uncontrolled Recursion

The product does not properly control the amount of recursion which takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published