CVE-2015-8978

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2016-11-22 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-399

Description

In Soap Lite (aka the SOAP::Lite extension for Perl) 1.14 and earlier, an example attack consists of defining 10 or more XML entities, each defined as consisting of 10 of the previous entity, with the document consisting of a single instance of the largest entity, which expands to one billion copies of the first entity. The amount of computer memory used for handling an external SOAP call would likely exceed that available to the process parsing the XML.

Affected products

Soap::Lite Project Soap::Lite: through 1.14

References

http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/PHRED/SOAP-Lite-1.20/Changes
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94487
http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/PHRED/SOAP-Lite-1.20/Changes
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94487

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