AlmaLinux 9.2 [TuxCare] Security Update: expat / expat-devel / expat-static Multiple Vulnerabilities (ALMALINUX9.2:CLSA-2026:1790802906)

high Nessus Plugin ID 353339

Synopsis

The AlmaLinux host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

The AlmaLinux 9.2 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the TuxCare ALMALINUX9.2:CLSA-2026:1790802906 advisory.

- Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c, where processing N specified attributes with non-normalized values triggers an O(N^2) linear scan of elementType->defaultAtts to determine CDATA status. A remote unauthenticated attacker can supply a single well-formed XML document of a few megabytes to an application parsing untrusted XML to cause excessive CPU consumption, resulting in denial of service without requiring authentication, external entity resolution, or non-default parser options. (CVE-2026-66046)

- Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.
(CVE-2026-93990)

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the affected packages based on the guidance in TuxCare advisory ALMALINUX9.2:CLSA-2026:1790802906.

See Also

https://cve.tuxcare.com/els/releases/CLSA-2026:1790802906

http://www.nessus.org/u?96cbd48e

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 353339

File Name: tuxcare_alma_linux_9.2_CLSA-2026-1790802906.nasl

Version: 1.1

Type: Local

Published: 9/30/2026

Updated: 9/30/2026

Supported Sensors: Nessus Agent, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5

Percentile: 93.19

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 6.1

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2026-93990

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

CVSS v4

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 8.7

Threat Score: 7.7

Threat Vector: CVSS:4.0/E:P

Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Vulnerability Information

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/cpu, Host/AlmaLinux/release, Host/AlmaLinux/rpm-list, Host/OS/extended-third-party

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 9/30/2026

Vulnerability Publication Date: 8/18/2026

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2026-66046, CVE-2026-93990

CLSA: 2026:1790802906