CVE-2016-9435 Opensuse CVE debrief

Who should care

System administrators, distro maintainers, and users who rely on w3m to render untrusted or externally supplied HTML should care most. Security teams supporting affected openSUSE and w3m deployments should prioritize validation and patching.

Technical summary

NVD describes the issue as a CWE-20 input-validation problem in w3m’s file.c HTMLtagproc1 function. The function does not properly initialize values while processing <dd> tags, and a remote attacker can use a crafted HTML file to crash the application. The CVSS vector indicates no confidentiality or integrity impact, but high availability impact with user interaction required.

Defensive priority

Medium. The issue is remotely triggerable but requires user interaction and results in application crash rather than code execution, so it is primarily an availability concern. Patch quickly if w3m is used to open untrusted HTML content.

Recommended defensive actions

• Upgrade w3m to a fixed release or apply the vendor/backported patch referenced in the advisory trail.
• Confirm downstream packages from your distribution include the fix, especially if you use openSUSE builds.
• Treat untrusted HTML as unsafe input and avoid opening unknown content in w3m until patched.
• Review any automation or scripts that invoke w3m against external content and ensure they run with least privilege.
• Track vendor advisories and security notices for your Linux distribution to confirm remediation status.

Evidence notes

This debrief is based on the official NVD record and the linked advisory/patch references in the source corpus. NVD lists the weakness as CWE-20 and the CVSS v3.0 vector as AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H. Supporting references include the openSUSE update notice, the oss-security patch discussion, the upstream GitHub issue and commit, and the Gentoo GLSA. No exploit details are included here.

Official resources