wsf/common/DOMUtils.java in JBossWS Native in Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2.0.CP09, 4.3, and 5.1.1; JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 4.3.CP06 and 5.1.1; JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.2.CP05, 4.3.CP05, and 5.1.0; JBoss Communications Platform 1.2.11 and 5.1.1; JBoss Enterprise BRMS Platform 5.1.0; and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform 5.1.1 does not properly handle recursion during entity expansion, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory and CPU consumption) via a crafted request containing an XML document with a DOCTYPE declaration and a large number of nested entity references, a similar issue to CVE-2003-1564.
JBoss Web will enter into an infinite loop when a surrogate pair character is placed at the boundary of an internal buffer. A remote attacker could exploit this flaw to trigger a denial-of-service attack against a JBoss Web server that is hosting applications with UTF-8 character encoding enabled, or that will include user-supplied UTF-8 strings in a response.