Bug 461107 (CVE-2003-1564)

Summary: CVE-2003-1564 libxml2: billion laughs DoS attack
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: Tomas Hoger <thoger>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: mnowak, veillard
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2008-09-11 14:08:00 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Public test case none

Description Tomas Hoger 2008-09-04 08:54:37 UTC 
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2003-1564 to the following vulnerability:

libxml2, possibly before 2.5.0, does not properly detect recursion
during entity expansion, which allows context-dependent attackers to
cause a denial of service (memory and CPU consumption) via a crafted
XML document containing a large number of nested entity references,
aka the "billion laughs attack."

References:
http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200302/post20020.html
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/65843/time_to_upgrade_libxml2
http://xmlsoft.org/news.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2008-August/msg00034.html
Comment 1 Tomas Hoger 2008-09-04 08:55:59 UTC 
Created attachment 315726 [details]
Public test case

Source: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/billion-laughs.xml
Comment 2 Tomas Hoger 2008-09-04 09:02:32 UTC 
libxml2 versions as shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5 are based on upstream version that detects this this type of attack.  Additionally, detection was further improved recently in the patch for the "attribute value" variant of this attack known as CVE-2008-3281 (see bug #458086 and bug #460396).
Comment 6 Red Hat Product Security 2008-09-11 14:08:00 UTC 
This issue was addressed in:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
  http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0886.html