Debian DSA-1923-1 : libhtml-parser-perl - denial of service

medium Nessus Plugin ID 44788

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Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security-related update.

Description

A denial of service vulnerability has been found in libhtml-parser-perl, a collection of modules to parse HTML in text documents which is used by several other projects like e.g.
SpamAssassin.

Mark Martinec discovered that the decode_entities() function will get stuck in an infinite loop when parsing certain HTML entities with invalid UTF-8 characters. An attacker can use this to perform denial of service attacks by submitting crafted HTML to an application using this functionality.

Solution

Upgrade the libhtml-parser-perl packages.

For the oldstable distribution (etch), this problem has been fixed in version 3.55-1+etch1.

For the stable distribution (lenny), this problem has been fixed in version 3.56-1+lenny1.

See Also

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=552531

https://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1923

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 44788

File Name: debian_DSA-1923.nasl

Version: 1.9

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 2/24/2010

Updated: 1/4/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3.4

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:libhtml-parser-perl, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:4.0, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:5.0

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Patch Publication Date: 10/27/2009

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2009-3627

CWE: 20

DSA: 1923