Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting xerces:xercesimpl package, versions [,2.11.0.SP5)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    1.87% (89th percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-XERCES-30183
  • published 15 Oct 2013
  • disclosed 23 Jul 2013
  • credit Unknown

How to fix?

Upgrade xerces:xercesImpl to version 2.11.0.SP5 or higher.

Overview

xerces:xercesImpl is a that is used for high performance, fully compliant XML parsers in the Apache Xerces family.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) which is caused by the way the JRE processes XML files. A remote attacker could use this flaw to supply crafted XML that would lead to a denial of service.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

version 3.1
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Snyk

Recommended
6.5 medium
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Network
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    None
  • User Interaction (UI)
    Required
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High
Expand this section

NVD

6.5 medium
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Red Hat

5.3 medium