CVE-2016-3705

high
Published 2016-05-17 ยท Modified 2026-05-06
CVSS v3
7.5
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
7.5

Description

The (1) xmlParserEntityCheck and (2) xmlParseAttValueComplex functions in parser.c in libxml2 2.9.3 do not properly keep track of the recursion depth, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (stack consumption and application crash) via a crafted XML document containing a large number of nested entity references.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
83%
Patch ETA
โ€”

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or โ€” if you've already worked around this in production โ€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

โœš Propose a mitigation on Community โ†’ Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
debian debianbookwormfixed2.9.3+dfsg1-1.1
debian debianbullseyefixed2.9.3+dfsg1-1.1
debian debianforkyfixed2.9.3+dfsg1-1.1
debian debiansidfixed2.9.3+dfsg1-1.1
debian debiantrixiefixed2.9.3+dfsg1-1.1
ubuntu ubuntu12.04affected
ubuntu ubuntu14.04affected
ubuntu ubuntu15.10affected
ubuntu ubuntu16.04affected
debian debian8.0affected
suse suse42.1affected

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
xmlsoftlibxml22.9.3
hp hpicewall_federation_agent3.0
hp hpicewall_file_manager3.0

References

CWEs

CWE-20

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.