USN-3235-1: libxml2 vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-3235-1

16th March, 2017

libxml2 vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its
derivatives:

• Ubuntu 16.10



• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS



• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS



• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Summary

Several security issues were fixed in libxml2.

Software description

• libxml2
  - GNOME XML library
  
  

Details

It was discovered that libxml2 incorrectly handled format strings. If a
user or automated system were tricked into opening a specially crafted
document, an attacker could possibly cause libxml2 to crash, resulting in a
denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04
LTS, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. ()

Nick Wellnhofer discovered that libxml2 incorrectly handled certain
malformed documents. If a user or automated system were tricked into
opening a specially crafted document, an attacker could cause libxml2 to
crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary
code. (







.

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make
all the necessary changes.

References

,

CVE-2016-5131