CVE-2018-20843 describes a denial-of-service vulnerability in libexpat versions prior to 2.2.7, affecting various products including Canonical, Debian, Fedora, and Oracle. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this by submitting XML input with numerous colons in XML names, causing the parser to consume excessive RAM and CPU resources. With a CVSS score of 7.5 (High), this vulnerability presents a significant availability risk due to its low attack complexity and network-based vector. There is currently no evidence of active exploitation, nor are there publicly available exploits in Metasploit or ExploitDB, and it has received minimal community discussion or media coverage.
| Vendor | Product | Version(s) | CPE |
|---|---|---|---|
< 2.2.7CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:libexpat_project:libexpat:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | ||
12.04CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:12.04:*:*:*:-:*:*:* | ||
14.04CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:14.04:*:*:*:esm:*:*:* | ||
16.04CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:16.04:*:*:*:lts:*:*:* | ||
18.04CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:*:*:*:lts:*:*:* |
CVSS version used by this source: 3.1
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.1 Bluesky, 0.1 Mastodon, and 0.4 GitHub mentions.
No media coverage found for this CVE.
The average CVE in this peer group has 0.1 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.
CVE-2018-20843
Aug 11, 2020expat: large number of colons in input makes parser consume high amount of resources, leading to DoS
Jun 24, 2019In libexpat in Expat before 2.2.7 XML input including XML names that contain a large number of colons could make the XML parser consume a high amount of RAM and CPU resources while processing (enough to be usable for denial-of-service attacks).
Jun 11, 2019