NULL pointer dereference in parsing invalid HTML

Stu Tomlinson stu at nosnilmot.com
Thu Oct 4 08:39:26 EDT 2007


Hello packagers,

There is a NULL pointer dereference in purple_markup_html_to_xhtml when
parsing invalid HTML. This will cause libpurple using IM clients (Finch,
Pidgin, Adium etc.) to crash if receiving a message containing invalid
HTML.

I believe the crash can only be triggered if using HTML logging, and it
requires the remote user to be able to send invalid HTML - I believe
this is possible on AIM, and probably also possible on some XMPP
networks. Other protocols may also be affected.

This bug was introduced in Pidgin/libpurple 2.1.0

I have attached a patch that fixes this issue. I have not committed this
yet because I can't think of a useful commit message that doesn't make
it obvious that this is a vulnerability.

This was originally reported as http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/3436

I think we need a CVE # for this, and we might want to release 2.2.2 -
what do others think?

Regards,


Stu.
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