Bugtraq: Security advisory - Xerces-C++ 2.5.0: Attribute blowup

["Amit Klein (AKsecurity)" <aksecurity () hotpop com>]

***
*** Security Advisory
***

***
*** Xerces-C++ 2.5.0: Attribute blowup denial-of-service
***

*** Author: Amit Klein

*** Release Date: October 2nd, 2004

*** Description:
An attacker can craft a malicious XML document, which uses XML 
attributes in a way that inflicts a denial of service condition 
on the target machine (XML parser).
The result of this attack is that the XML parser consumes all the CPU 

resources for a long period of time (from seconds to minutes, 
depending on the size of the payload).
In our experiments, we were able to send attacks (of few hunderd KBs) 

that caused the target machines to consume 100% CPU for several 
minutes.

*** Vendor status
Vendor was contacted, and a fix was included for the newly released 
version of Xerces-C++ (2.6.0).

*** Solution:
Upgrade to Xerces-C++ 2.6.0