Security Information / 2016 / Security Information -- DSA-3597-1 expat

Debian Security Advisory

DSA-3597-1 expat -- security update

Date Reported:

07 Jun 2016

Affected Packages:

expat

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2012-6702, CVE-2016-5300.

More information:

Two related issues have been discovered in Expat, a C library for parsing XML.

• CVE-2012-6702

  It was introduced when CVE-2012-0876 was addressed. Stefan Sørensen discovered that the use of the function XML_Parse() seeds the random number generator generating repeated outputs for rand() calls.

• CVE-2016-5300

  It is the product of an incomplete solution for CVE-2012-0876. The parser poorly seeds the random number generator allowing an attacker to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) via an XML file with crafted identifiers.

You might need to manually restart programs and services using expat libraries.

For the stable distribution (jessie), these problems have been fixed in version 2.1.0-6+deb8u3.

For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 2.1.1-3.

We recommend that you upgrade your expat packages.