CVE-2016-4472
HighSummary
The overflow protection in Expat is removed by compilers with certain optimization settings, allowing remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted XML data.
Risk Assessment
Organizations may be exposed to attacks that lead to system crashes or unauthorized code execution, potentially resulting in data loss or access to sensitive information.
Recommendation
It is recommended to update Expat to the latest version that includes security fixes to mitigate the risks associated with this vulnerability.
Other vulnerabilities in Expat
See all- CVE-2016-0718Critical
Expat allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a malformed input document, which triggers a buffer overflow.
- CVE-2009-3720Medium
The updatePosition function in libexpat (Expat 2.0.1) has a buffer over-read vulnerability. Crafted UTF-8 sequences in an XML document can cause an application crash.
- CVE-2026-76641High
Expat through 2.8.3 contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that allows attackers to trigger memory corruption by processing XML with external entity parsers created via XML_ExternalEntityParserCreate. A struct size mismatch between ELEMENT_TYPE members causes storeAtts to read the attIndex member past allocated memory boundaries, resulting in failure to normalize whitespace in non-CDATA attributes or a wild pointer dereference causing a segfault. This vulnerability was introduced by the fix for CVE-2026-66046.
- CVE-2026-66046High
Denial of service vulnerability in Expat through 2.8.3. The storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c has quadratic complexity, causing excessive CPU consumption when processing an XML document with many attributes with non-normalized values.
Original NVD description (English source)
The overflow protection in Expat is removed by compilers with certain optimization settings, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted XML data. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2015-1283 and CVE-2015-2716.