CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedExpat versions up to 2.8.3 are vulnerable to a denial of service attack due to a quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function, which can lead to excessive CPU consumption when processing XML documents with non-normalized attribute values. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability by submitting a specially crafted XML document, potentially disrupting service availability. Organizations utilizing Expat for XML parsing should prioritize patching or mitigating this vulnerability to prevent potential service outages.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
Note: these links are listed for security research and verification purposes only.
Original NVD Description
Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c, where processing N specified attributes with non-normalized values triggers an O(N^2) linear scan of elementType->defaultAtts to determine CDATA status. A remote unauthenticated attacker can supply a single well-formed XML document of a few megabytes to an application parsing untrusted XML to cause excessive CPU consumption, resulting in denial of service without requiring authentication, external entity resolution, or non-default parser options.