Debian Security Advisory DSA 2978-1 (libxml2 - security update)

Summary
Daniel P. Berrange discovered a denial of service vulnerability in libxml2 entity substitution.
Solution
For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2.8.0+dfsg1-7+wheezy1. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 2.9.1+dfsg1-4. We recommend that you upgrade your libxml2 packages.
Insight
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.
Affected
libxml2 on Debian Linux
Detection
This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.
References