SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2017-9047

A buffer overflow was discovered in libxml2 20904-GITv2.9.4-16-g0741801.

HIGH 7.5EPSS 3.19%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (3.19%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

A buffer overflow was discovered in libxml2 20904-GITv2.9.4-16-g0741801. The function xmlSnprintfElementContent in valid.c is supposed to recursively dump the element content definition into a char buffer 'buf' of size 'size'. The variable len is assigned strlen(buf). If the content->type is XML_ELEMENT_CONTENT_ELEMENT, then (i) the content->prefix is appended to buf (if it actually fits) whereupon (ii) content->name is written to the buffer. However, the check for whether the content->name actually fits also uses 'len' rather than the updated buffer length strlen(buf). This allows us to write about "size" many bytes beyond the allocated memory. This vulnerability causes programs that use libxml2, such as PHP, to crash.

CVSS 3.0
7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
3.19% probability · 87th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-119
Affected
xmlsoft/libxml2
Source
cve@mitre.org

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.