libexpat before 2.8.3 has an out-of-bounds read and resultant infinite loop because low surrogates are treated the same as high surrogates during Unicode processing in the toUtf16 functions.
libexpat before 2.7.5 allows an infinite loop while parsing DTD content.
libexpat before 2.7.5 allows a NULL pointer dereference in the function setContext on retry after an earlier ouf-of-memory condition.
In libexpat before 2.7.4, XMLExternalEntityParserCreate does not copy unknown encoding handler user data.
In libexpat before 2.7.4, the doContent function does not properly determine the buffer size bufSize because there is no integer overflow check for tag buffer reallocation.
It was found that original patch for issues CVE-2015-1283 and CVE-2015-2716 used overflow checks that could be optimized out by some compilers applying certain optimization settings, which can cause the vulnerability to remain even after applying the patch.
One pattern in the fix for CVE-2015-1283/CVE-2015-2716 is:
/ bufferSize is positive here / do { bufferSize = 2; } while (bufferSize < neededSize && bufferSize > 0); if (bufferSize <= 0) { errorCode = XMLERRORNOMEMORY; return NULL;
Any of the modern optimizing compiler, IF able to infer that bufferSize is initially positive (which is true but not obvious to see through local reasoning), will eliminate bufferSize > 0 as always true when the execution is defined, and bufferSize <= 0 as always false when the execution is defined.
Without knowing that bufferSize starts positive, an optimizing compiler could also move the test bufferSize > 0 out of the loop, that is, compile the code as if it had been written:
if (bufferSize <= 0) errorCode = XMLERRORNOMEMORY; return NULL; else { do { bufferSize = 2; } while (bufferSize < neededSize); }
Both cases leads to not eliminating the vulnerability.
Upstream patch:
https://sourceforge.net/p/expat/codegit/ci/f0bec73b018caa07d3e75ec8dd967f3785d71bde/tree/expat/lib/xmlparse.c?diff=a238d7ea7a715ef3850c4cbdd86aeda7077b6bbc
Last updated 24 July 2024
Expat is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by the improper handling of XML data by the big2toUtf8 function within the libexpat library. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability using a specially-crafted XML document containing malformed UTF-8 sequences that trigger a buffer over-read to cause the application to crash.