CVE-2016-3705 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2016-3705?

CVE-2016-3705 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 17 May 2016. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official 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.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-3705?

It affects 6 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Hp Icewall Federation Agent, Hp Icewall File Manager, Opensuse Leap, Xmlsoft Libxml2.

How do I fix CVE-2016-3705?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2016-3705 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-3705 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2016-3705, ECHO-67fc-5e7f-a9c5, GHSA-r6qj-ff26-p4v7, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-3705.