What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-14647

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 10.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-09-25 · updated 2026-10-07
• Weakness: CWE-335

Description

Python's elementtree C accelerator failed to initialise Expat's hash salt during initialization. This could make it easy to conduct denial of service attacks against Expat by constructing an XML document that would cause pathological hash collisions in Expat's internal data structures, consuming large amounts CPU and RAM. The vulnerability exists in Python versions 3.7.0, 3.6.0 through 3.6.6, 3.5.0 through 3.5.6, 3.4.0 through 3.4.9, 2.7.0 through 2.7.15.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04, 16.04, 18.04
• Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 30
• openSUSE Leap: 15.1
• Python: from 2.7.0 through 2.7.15; from 3.4.0 through 3.4.9; from 3.5.0 through 3.5.6; from 3.6.0 through 3.6.6; 3.7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 7.0

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-01/msg00040.html
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/105396
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041740
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:1260
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2030
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:3725
• https://bugs.python.org/issue34623
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-14647
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r1b103833cb5bc8466e24ff0ecc5e75b45a705334ab6a444e64e840a0%40%3Cissues.bookkeeper.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/06/msg00022.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/06/msg00023.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/RBJCB2HWOJLP3L7CUQHJHNBHLSVOXJE5/

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