Skip to main content

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

CVE-2019-5442

Severity High
Score 7.5/10

Summary

XML Entity Expansion (Billion Laughs Attack) on Pippo from 1.12.0 results in Denial of Service.Entities are created recursively and large amounts of heap memory is taken. Eventually, the JVM process will run out of memory. Otherwise, if the OS does not bound the memory on that process, memory will continue to be exhausted and will affect other processes on the system.

  • 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