RHSA-2014:1655 — Security Advisory
Red Hat Security Advisory: libxml2 security update
Severity
ModerateRed Hat Product Security
Products
Official CSAF product identity
Published · October 17, 2014
Updated · June 25, 2026
Topic
Updated libxml2 packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.
Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.
Description
The libxml2 library is a development toolbox providing the implementation of various XML standards.
A denial of service flaw was found in libxml2, a library providing support to read, modify and write XML and HTML files. A remote attacker could provide a specially crafted XML file that, when processed by an application using libxml2, would lead to excessive CPU consumption (denial of service) based on excessive entity substitutions, even if entity substitution was disabled, which is the parser default behavior. (CVE-2014-3660)
All libxml2 users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. The desktop must be restarted (log out, then log back in) for this update to take effect.