What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-4472

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 11.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2016-06-30 · updated 2026-10-08
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

The overflow protection in Expat is removed by compilers with certain optimization settings, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted XML data. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2015-1283 and CVE-2015-2716.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04
• libexpat project libexpat: through 2.1.1
• McAfee,LLC McAfee Policy Auditor: before 6.5.1 — fixed in 6.5.1
• Python: from 2.7.0 before 2.7.15; from 3.3.0 before 3.3.7; from 3.4.0 before 3.4.7; from 3.5.0 before 3.5.4; from 3.6.0 before 3.6.2 — fixed in 2.7.15, 3.3.7, 3.4.7, 3.5.4, 3.6.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: McAfee,LLC McAfee Policy Auditor 6.5.1; Python 2.7.15, 3.3.7, 3.4.7, 3.5.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/91528
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-3013-1
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1344251
• https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=SB10365
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201701-21
• https://sourceforge.net/p/expat/code_git/ci/f0bec73b018caa07d3e75ec8dd967f3785d71bde
• https://www.tenable.com/security/tns-2016-20
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/91528
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-3013-1
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1344251
• https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=SB10365
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201701-21

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