jabberd 1.x: Denial of Service vulnerability

Background

Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols enabling message, presence, and other structured information exchange between two hosts. jabberd is the original implementation of the Jabber protocol server.

Description

Jose Antonio Calvo found a defect in routines handling XML parsing of incoming data. jabberd 1.x may crash upon reception of invalid data on any socket connection on which XML is parsed.

Impact

A remote attacker may send a specific sequence of bytes to an open socket to crash the jabberd server, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All jabberd users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge sync
 
 # emerge -pv ">=net-im/jabberd-1.4.3-r4"
 # emerge ">=net-im/jabberd-1.4.3-r4"