A denial of service flaw was found in the way Kupu, a document-centric open source client-side WYSIWYG editor, sanitized certain URLs durin spellcheck operation. When the Kupu editor was used with Plone content management system, a remote attacker could provide a specially-crafted input into the Kupu editor that, when processed would cause the ZServer thread to lock, refusing to serve future requests. References: [1] http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106/12 [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 kupu_spellcheck.py change from upstream HotFix is relevant to this issue.
The CVE identifier of CVE-2012-5496 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 not affect plone as provided with the conga package on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Statement: Not vulnerable. This issue did not affect the versions of luci (as provided by conga) as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.