News
Vigil@nce - Ruby: denial of service of REXML via entities
March 2013 by Vigil@nce
This bulletin was written by Vigil@nce : http://vigilance.fr/offer
SYNTHESIS OF THE VULNERABILITY
An attacker can transmit malicious XML data to a Ruby REXML
application, in order to force it to allocate large memory
resources.
Impacted products: Fedora, RHEL, Unix (platform)
Severity: 2/4
Creation date: 22/02/2013
DESCRIPTION OF THE VULNERABILITY
The Ruby REXML parser processes XML data.
An XML entity (such as "&abc;") is used to define an alias of a
text string.
However, if the same large entity is called several thousand times
in an XML document, REXML consumes numerous resources to store the
XML tree.
An attacker can therefore transmit malicious XML data to a Ruby
REXML application, in order to force it to allocate large memory
resources.
ACCESS TO THE COMPLETE VIGIL@NCE BULLETIN
http://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/Ruby-denial-of-service-of-REXML-via-entities-12456
