XML Library Flaw — Sun, Apache, GNOME Affected

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 5, 2009 @04:27AM from the finding-fast-fixes-for-flaws dept.

bednarz writes with this excerpt from Network World: "Vulnerabilities discovered in XML libraries from Sun, the Apache Software Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the GNOME Project could result in successful denial-of-service attacks on applications built with them, according to Codenomicon. The security vendor found flaws in XML parsers that made it fairly easy to cause a DoS attack, corruption of data, and delivery of a malicious payload using XML-based content. Codenomicon has shared its findings with industry and the open source groups, and a number of recommendations and patches for the XML-related vulnerabilities are expected to be made available Wednesday. In addition, a general security advisory is expected to be published by the Computer Emergency Response Team in Finland (CERT-FI)."

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Someone just rediscovered XML Entity Attacks by Rich · 2009-08-05 08:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's difficult to say from the information provided, but it sounds like someone just rediscovered XML entity attacks (as I did a few years ago). Assuming it is the same thing, here are some references from 2002 and 2006 with more details:
http://www.securiteam.com/securitynews/6D0100A5PU.html
http://www.sift.com.au/assets/downloads/SIFT-XML-Port-Scanning-v1-00.pdf
I've used these attacks in real-world tests and they are still surprisingly effective - just not new.