CVE-2020-7595 libxml as used in Nokogiri has an infinite loop in a certain end-of-file situation

What is CVE-2020-7595?

CVE-2020-7595 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 21 Jan 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

xmlStringLenDecodeEntities in parser.c in libxml2 2.9.10 has an infinite loop in a certain end-of-file situation.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-7595?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including nokogiri. It affects 24 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Netapp Clustered Data Ontap, Netapp H300e Firmware, Netapp H300s Firmware and 18 more.

How do I fix CVE-2020-7595?

Upgrade nokogiri to 1.10.8 or later.

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-2020-7595 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2020-7595 exists.

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 ALPINE-CVE-2020-7595, DEBIAN-CVE-2020-7595, ECHO-330d-8331-b637, GHSA-7553-jr98-vx47, JLSEC-2025-68, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-7595.