CVE-2020-5227Medium· 4.4▾ SunlitFeedgen Vulnerable to XML Denial of Service Attacks
▾ Sunlit zone — Low / medium · no exploitation signal
impact 24.2 · likelihood 0.4 · exploitation 0
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Exploit-prediction probability, daily snapshots since Jul 8.
Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.
Disclosed via OSV
Last analysed / modified upstream
1.6%
1.6% → 2.2%
The feedgen library allows supplying XML as content for some of the available fields. This XML will be parsed and integrated into the existing XML tree. During this process, feedgen is vulnerable to XML Denial of Service Attacks (e.g. XML Bomb).
This becomes a concern in particular if feedgen is used to include content from untrused sources and if XML (including XHTML) is directly included instead of providing plain tex content only.
This problem has been fixed in feedgen 0.9.0 which disallows XML entity expansion and external resources.
Updating is strongly recommended and should not be problematic. Nevertheless, as a workaround, avoid providing XML directly to feedgen or ensure that no entity expansion is part of the XML.
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
feedgen < 0.9.0Upgrade to a patched release:
feedgen 0.9.0