A denial of service flaw was found in the way Plone, a user friendly and powerful content management system, performed processing of very large values passed to an internal utility function being exposed on an URL. A remote attacker could provide a specially-crafted URL that, when processed would lead to excessive memory consumption. References: [1] http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106/15 [2] http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106/ Relevant upstream HotFixes: [3] http://plone.org/products/plone-hotfix/releases/20121106 From the OSS post: [4] http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/11/07/4 the python_scripts.py formatColumns() change from upstream HotFix is relevant to this issue.
The CVE identifier of CVE-2012-5499 has been assigned to this issue: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/11/10/1
This issue may affect the version of plone as shipped with EPEL5, however the latest version there is 3.1.6 (and the latest 3.x release is 3.3.5, which was released a year prior to this flaw being discovered). Given the age of the EPEL5 package and its lack of support, we do not recommend anyone use it. This issue does affect plone as provided with the conga package on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
IssueDescription: It was discovered that Plone, included as a part of luci, did not properly handle the processing of very large values passed to an internal utility function. A remote attacker could use a specially crafted URL that, when processed, would lead to excessive memory consumption.
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2014:1194 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-1194.html