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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.3

CVE-2009-2473 json

neon before 0.28.6, when expat is used, does not properly detect recursion during entity expansion, which allows context-dependent attacker…

published 2009-08-21 17 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2009-2468

cvss
4.3
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
8.4%
EPSS 8.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 95%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

neon before 0.28.6, when expat is used, does not properly detect recursion during entity expansion, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (memory and CPU consumption) via a crafted XML document containing a large number of nested entity references, a similar issue to CVE-2003-1564.

Patch / fix

  • gnome-vfs2 RHEL 5 2.16.2-10.el5
  • gnome-vfs2-smb RHEL 5 2.16.2-10.el5
  • neon RHEL 4 0.24.7-4.el4_8.2
  • neon RHEL 5 0.25.5-10.el5_4.1

red hat advisories RHSA-2013:0131RHSA-2009:1452

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-2009-2473 updated cvss 4.3

neon: billion laughs DoS attack

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 gnome-vfs2
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) neon 0.25.5-10.el5_4.1, gnome-vfs2 2.16.2-10.el5, gnome-vfs2-smb 2.16.2-10.el5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS version 4 neon 0.24.7-4.el4_8.2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) neon 0.25.5-10.el5_4.1, gnome-vfs2 2.16.2-10.el5, gnome-vfs2-smb 2.16.2-10.el5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop version 4 neon 0.24.7-4.el4_8.2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop Workstation (v. 5 client) neon 0.25.5-10.el5_4.1, gnome-vfs2 2.16.2-10.el5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 4 neon 0.24.7-4.el4_8.2
    +1 more products
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS version 4 neon 0.24.7-4.el4_8.2
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2009:1452

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

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. First public exploit (EDB-10206)

Exploit prediction

8.44% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 95% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-10206 Expat 2.0.1 - UTF-8 Character XML Parsing Remote Denial of Service dos, 2009-11-12

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-399 Resource Management Errors

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns 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.