CVE-2018-1311

A use-after-free vulnerability was found in xerces-c in the way an XML document is processed via the SAX API. Applications that process XML documents with an external Document Type Definition (DTD) may be vulnerable to this flaw. A remote attacker could exploit this flaw by creating a specially crafted XML file that would crash the application or potentially lead to arbitrary code execution.

Mitigation

Disable DTD processing by setting the environment variable XERCES_DISABLE_DTD=1. Please note that this feature was introduced in xerces-c upstream version 3.1.4 and is not available in older versions. The versions of xerces-c as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 did not include this feature.