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Fencer Intel
medium 4.3

CVE-2015-5523 json

The ParseValue function in lexer.c in tidy before 4.9.31 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via vectors involving…

published 2015-08-11 11 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2015-5478

cvss
4.3
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.8%
EPSS 3.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 90%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The ParseValue function in lexer.c in tidy before 4.9.31 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via vectors involving multiple whitespace characters before an empty href, which triggers a large memory allocation.

Patch / fix

  • tidy Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 20091223cvs-1.2ubuntu1.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2015-5523

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • tidy SLED 11 SP4, SLED 11 SP3, SLE Software Development Kit 11 SP4 +1 more 1.0-37.1
  • tidy SLE Software Development Kit 12 1.0.20100204cvs-25.3

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2015:1525-1SUSE-SU-2015:1513-1

  • tidy openSUSE Tumbleweed 5.2.0-2.3

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10210-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2015-5523 updated cvss 5.1

tidy: heap buffer overflow in ParseValue()

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 tidy, libtidy
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

3.84% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 90% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • openwall.com http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/07/13/7 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • openwall.com http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/06/04/2 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • github.com https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5/issues/217#issuecomment-108565501 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.