CVE Catalog

CVE-2017-9047

High
Published: Translated: NVD NIST

Summary

A buffer overflow was discovered in the libxml2 library in the xmlSnprintfElementContent function, which can lead to writing data beyond allocated memory. The issue arises when the buffer length check does not account for the updated length after appending the prefix.

Risk Assessment

Exploitation of this vulnerability may lead to crashes of applications using libxml2, such as PHP, which can affect the availability of services within the organization.

Recommendation

It is recommended to update the libxml2 library to the latest version to mitigate this vulnerability and conduct application testing to identify potential issues.

Other vulnerabilities in libxml2

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Original NVD description (English source)

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.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS