I previously sent a similar issue to the Apache security team and they said 
since the issue had been publicly disclosed that I should just take it directly 
to the project, that’s why I did so in this case.


From: Michael Glavassevich [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2018 4:21 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] Re: CVE-2018-2799

This discussion should have probably started on security@ [1]. In future I 
would suggest reporting there before bringing it to one of the public lists.

I can confirm that the patch you've found treats the symptom of another problem 
but won't disclose details of what that problem is here. It's not specific to 
Xerces. I do agree that we should patch this.

Thanks.

[1] https://www.apache.org/security/

Michael Glavassevich
XML Technologies and WAS Development
IBM Toronto Lab
E-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
E-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

David Dillard <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 
wrote on 04/19/2018 02:36:54 PM:

> That’s the only change in the changeset and the last time that file
> was updated in OpenJDK was 2012, so I think that’s it.  I know it’s
> very little, that’s why I asked if people agree it’s a vulnerability
> – it doesn’t feel like the kind of issue described, but I don’t
> think Oracle would have published a CVE for it if they didn’t think it was.
>
>
> From: Gary Gregory [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2018 2:24 PM
> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: CVE-2018-2799
>
> So the idea is that the code blows up if nodes is _not_ a Vector.
> But, a Vector is not bound either. Is there more to the fix than that?
>
> Gary
>
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 12:16 PM, David Dillard <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]%0b>> > wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Tuesday, Oracle released its Quarterly Critical Patch Update, which included
> some fixes for Java.  I saw that one of those fixes was for JAXP
> (CVE-2018-2799).  Going to Red Hat’s CVE database to get a real description
> of the issue it says “It was discovered that the implementation of
> the NamedNodeMapImpl class in the JAXP component of OpenJDK did not
> limit the amount of memory allocated when creating object instance
> from a serialized form.  A specially-crafted input could cause a
> Java application to use an excessive amount of memory when
> deserialized.”  It also includes the OpenJDK issue #.  Looking for
> that change in the OpenJDK repository it shows a small change in
> readObject that is not found in the current Apache Xerces code.
>
> Current Xerces code:
>
>     private void readObject(ObjectInputStream in)
>         throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
>         in.defaultReadObject();
>         if (nodes != null) {
>             nodes = new ArrayList(nodes);
>         }
>     }
>
>
> Current OpenJDK code:
>
>     private void readObject(ObjectInputStream in)
>         throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
>         in.defaultReadObject();
>         if (nodes != null) {
>             // cast to Vector is required
>             nodes = new ArrayList((Vector)nodes);
>         }
>     }
>
>
> Should this modification be made to Xerces?  Do people agree that
> it’s a vulnerability?
>
> Thanks,
>
> David

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