USN-1527-2: XML-RPC for C and C++ vulnerabilities

10 September 2012

XML-RPC for C and C++ could be made to cause a denial of service by consuming excessive CPU and memory resources.

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Releases

Packages

  • xmlrpc-c - Lightweight RPC library based on XML and HTTP

Details

USN-1527-1 fixed vulnerabilities in Expat. This update provides the
corresponding updates for XML-RPC for C and C++. Both issues described in the
original advisory affected XML-RPC for C and C++ in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 11.04,
11.10 and 12.04 LTS.

Original advisory 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)

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Update instructions

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

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 XML-RPC for C and C++ to effect the necessary changes.