1.128. neon

Updated neon packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5.

This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

neon is an HTTP and WebDAV client library, with a C interface. It provides a high-level interface to HTTP and WebDAV methods along with a low-level interface for HTTP request handling. neon supports persistent connections, proxy servers, basic, digest and Kerberos authentication, and has complete SSL support.

It was discovered that neon is affected by the previously published "null prefix attack", caused by incorrect handling of NULL characters in X.509 certificates. If an attacker is able to get a carefully-crafted certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority, the attacker could use the certificate during a man-in-the-middle attack and potentially confuse an application using the neon library into accepting it by mistake. (CVE-2009-2474)

A denial of service flaw was found in the neon Extensible Markup Language (XML) parser. A remote attacker (malicious DAV server) could provide a specially-crafted XML document that would cause excessive memory and CPU consumption if an application using the neon XML parser was tricked into processing it. (CVE-2009-2473)

All neon users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. Applications using the neon HTTP and WebDAV client library, such as cadaver, must be restarted for this update to take effect.