Detections
Analytics

RHEL 5 : expat (Unpatched Vulnerability)

high Nessus Plugin ID 195683

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat 5 host is affected by multiple vulnerabilities that will not be patched.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has one or more packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities that have been acknowledged by the vendor but will not be patched.

 - expat: Undefined behavior and pointer overflows (CVE-2016-4472)

 - The XML parser in Expat does not use sufficient entropy for hash initialization, which allows context- dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) via crafted identifiers in an XML document. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2012-0876. (CVE-2016-5300)

 - XML External Entity vulnerability in libexpat 2.2.0 and earlier (Expat XML Parser Library) allows attackers to put the parser in an infinite loop using a malformed external entity definition from an external DTD. (CVE-2017-9233)

 - In libexpat in Expat before 2.2.7, XML input including XML names that contain a large number of colons could make the XML parser consume a high amount of RAM and CPU resources while processing (enough to be usable for denial-of-service attacks). (CVE-2018-20843)

 - In libexpat before 2.2.8, crafted XML input could fool the parser into changing from DTD parsing to document parsing too early; a consecutive call to XML_GetCurrentLineNumber (or XML_GetCurrentColumnNumber) then resulted in a heap-based buffer over-read. (CVE-2019-15903)

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied on the package manager's report that the package is installed.

Solution

The vendor has acknowledged the vulnerabilities but no solution has been provided. Refer to the vendor for remediation guidance.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 195683

File Name: redhat_unpatched-expat-rhel5.nasl

Version: 1.1

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 5/11/2024

Updated: 5/11/2024

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.8

Temporal Score: 5.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2016-4472

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 8.1

Temporal Score: 7.3

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:7, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:compat-expat1, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:expat, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:firefox, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:mingw-virt-viewer, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:thunderbird, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xmlrpc-c, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xulrunner

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 6/7/2016

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2016-4472, CVE-2016-5300, CVE-2017-9233, CVE-2018-20843, CVE-2019-15903