What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2008-3281

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2008-08-27 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-776

Description

libxml2 2.6.32 and earlier does not properly detect recursion during entity expansion in an attribute value, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (memory and CPU consumption) via a crafted XML document.

Affected products

• Apple Iphone Os: from 1.0.0 before 3.0 — fixed in 3.0
• Apple Safari: before 4.0 — fixed in 4.0
• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04
• Debian Linux: 4.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 9
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 3.0, 4.0, 5.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Eus: 4.7, 5.2
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0
• VMware ESX: 2.5.4, 2.5.5, 3.0.2, 3.0.3
• xmlsoft libxml2: through 2.6.32

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apple Iphone Os 3.0; Apple Safari 4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2009/Jun/msg00005.html
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2009/jun/msg00002.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2008-09/msg00004.html
• http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2008/000039.html
• http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2008-August/msg00034.html
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31558
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31566
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31590
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31728
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31748
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31855
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31982

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