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Improper Restriction of Recursive Entity References in DTDs ('XML Entity Expansion')

CVE-2019-15903

Severity High
Score 7.5/10

Summary

In libexpat V19990626 before 2_2_8, crafted XML input could fool the parser into changing from DTD parsing to document parsing too early; a consecutive call to XML_GetCurrentLineNumber (or XML_GetCurrentColumnNumber) then resulted in a heap-based buffer over-read.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-776 - Improper Restriction of Recursive Entity References in DTDs ('XML Entity Expansion')

The software uses XML documents and allows their structure to be defined with a Document Type Definition (DTD), but it does not properly control the number of recursive definitions of entities.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published