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Fencer Intel
medium 4.7

CVE-2017-5969 json

libxml2 2.9.4, when used in recover mode, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference) via a crafted XML…

published 2017-04-11 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-15038

cvss
4.7
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.6%
EPSS 2.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 85%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

libxml2 2.9.4, when used in recover mode, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference) via a crafted XML document. NOTE: The maintainer states "I would disagree of a CVE with the Recover parsing option which should only be used for manual recovery at least for XML parser.

Patch / fix

  • libxml2 Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 2.9.4+dfsg1-5.1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-5969

  • libxml2 SLES for SAP 11 SP4, SLES 11 SP4, SLE Software Development Kit 11 SP4 2.7.6-0.76.1
  • libxml2-python SLES for SAP 11 SP4, SLES 11 SP4 2.7.6-0.76.4
  • libxml2 SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES for Raspberry Pi 12 SP2, SLES 12 SP2 +2 more 2.9.4-42.1
  • python-libxml2 SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES for Raspberry Pi 12 SP2, SLES 12 SP2 +1 more 2.9.4-42.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2017:1813-1SUSE-SU-2017:1670-1

  • libxml2 openSUSE Tumbleweed 2.9.12-1.2

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11016-1

  • libxml2 Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +16 more 2.9.4-r4
  • libxml2 Alpine 3.5, Alpine 3.4, Alpine 3.3 +1 more 2.9.4-r3

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2017-5969

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

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-2017-5969 updated cvss 5.5

libxml2: Null pointer dereference in xmlSaveDoc implementation

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 libxml2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 libxml2, libxml2-python Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 libxml2, libxml2-python
    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

2.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 85% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 4.7 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 2.6 AV:N/AC:H/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness

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.