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.

Peter Valchev discovered a flaw in the way expat handled malformed UTF-8 sequences when processing XML files. Incorrect UTF-8 sequenced could cause expat to fail to properly detect end of input and continue reading behind the end of input buffer. This results in a crash once reading reaches unmapped memory.

Non-public upstream bug report: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1990430&groupid=10127&atid=110127

Contents of the report leaked via expat-bugs mailing list posts: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/expat-bugs/2009-January/002781.html

Upstream patch: http://expat.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/expat/expat/lib/xmltokimpl.c?r1=1.13&r2=1.15

References: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=551936 https://bugs.gentoo.org/showbug.cgi?id=280615