Sogeti found a denial of service flaw in libxml2, a library providing support to read, modify and write XML and HTML files. A remote attacker could provide a specially crafted XML file that, when processed by an application using libxml2, would lead to excessive CPU consumption (denial of service) based on excessive entity substitutions, even if entity substitution was disabled, which is the parser default behavior. (CVE-2014-3660 ) In addition, this update addresses a misapplied chunk for a patch released in version 2.8.0+dfsg1-7+wheezy1 (#762864), and a memory leak regression (#765770) introduced in version 2.8.0+dfsg1-7+nmu3.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2.8.0+dfsg1-7+wheezy2. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 2.9.2+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/2014/dsa-3057.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25