Aki Helin of OUSPG discovered many out-of-bounds read issues in libxml2, the GNOME project's XML parser library, which can lead to denial of service issues when handling XML documents that end abruptly.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 2.7.8.dfsg-2+squeeze8. For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2.8.0+dfsg1-7+nmu2. For the testing (jessie) and unstable (sid) distributions, this problem has been fixed in version 2.9.1+dfsg1-1. We recommend that you upgrade your libxml2 packages.

XML is a metalanguage to let you design your own markup language. A regular markup language defines a way to describe information in a certain class of documents (eg HTML). XML lets you define your own customized markup languages for many classes of document. It can do this because it's written in SGML, the international standard metalanguage for markup languages.

libxml2 on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2779.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25