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

CVE-2021-32623

Severity Medium
Score 6.5/10

Summary

Opencast is a free and open source solution for automated video capture and distribution. Versions of Opencast prior to 9.6 are vulnerable to the billion laughs attack, which allows an attacker to easily execute a (seemingly permanent) denial of service attack, essentially taking down Opencast using a single HTTP request. To exploit this, users need to have ingest privileges, limiting the group of potential attackers The problem has been fixed in Opencast 9.6. There is no known workaround for this issue.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • 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.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published