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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2015-8978 json

In Soap Lite (aka the SOAP::Lite extension for Perl) 1.14 and earlier, an example attack consists of defining 10 or more XML entities, each…

published 2016-11-22 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2015-8832

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.6%
EPSS 1.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 75%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In Soap Lite (aka the SOAP::Lite extension for Perl) 1.14 and earlier, an example attack consists of defining 10 or more XML entities, each defined as consisting of 10 of the previous entity, with the document consisting of a single instance of the largest entity, which expands to one billion copies of the first entity. The amount of computer memory used for handling an external SOAP call would likely exceed that available to the process parsing the XML.

Patch / fix

  • libsoap-lite-perl Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.19-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2015-8978

  • perl-SOAP-Lite SLE Software Development Kit 11 SP4 0.710.08-3.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2016:3052-1

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-2015-8978 updated cvss 3.3

perl-SOAP-Lite: XML exponential entity expansion denial-of-service

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perl-SOAP-Lite Red Hat Satellite 5 perl-SOAP-Lite
    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

1.55% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 75% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-399 Resource Management Errors

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.