CVE-2014-5177

It was found that libvirt passes the XML_PARSE_NOENT flag when parsing XML documents using the libxml2 library, in which case all XML entities in the parsed documents are expanded. A user able to force libvirtd to parse an XML document with an entity pointing to a file could use this flaw to read the contents of that file (limited to libvirt as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7); parsing an XML document with an entity pointing to a special file that blocks on read access could cause libvirtd to hang indefinitely, resulting in a denial of service on the system.

This issue affects the versions of libvirt as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, however the impact is limited to denial of service since it does not support fine grained access control.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.