USN-1527-1: Expat vulnerabilities

10 August 2012

Expat could be made to cause a denial of service by consuming excessive CPU and memory resources.

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Releases

Packages

  • expat - XML parsing C library - example application

Details

It was discovered that Expat computed hash values without restricting the
ability to trigger hash collisions predictably. If a user or application linked
against Expat were tricked into opening a crafted XML file, an attacker could
cause a denial of service by consuming excessive CPU resources. (CVE-2012-0876)

Tim Boddy discovered that Expat did not properly handle memory reallocation
when processing XML files. If a user or application linked against Expat were
tricked into opening a crafted XML file, an attacker could cause a denial of
service by consuming excessive memory resources. This issue only affected
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, 10.04 LTS, 11.04 and 11.10. (CVE-2012-1148)

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 11.10
Ubuntu 11.04
Ubuntu 10.04

After a standard system upgrade you need to restart any applications linked
against Expat to effect the necessary changes.