CVE-2015-8978

high

Published 2016-11-22 · Modified 2026-05-06

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CVSS v3

7.5

CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

7.5

Description

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

83%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

SUSE Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`1.19-1`
sid	Fixed	`1.19-1`
forky	Fixed	`1.19-1`
bullseye	Fixed	`1.19-1`
bookworm	Fixed	`1.19-1`

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
soap\	\	`{"endIncluding":"1.14"}`

References

CWEs

CWE-399

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.