Security researchers today unveiled details about a little-known but ubiquitous class of vulnerabilities that may reside in a range of Internet components, from Web applications to mobile and cloud computing platforms to documents, images and instant messaging products. At issue are problems with the way many hardware and software makers handle data from an open standard called XML. Short for “eXtensible Markup Language,” XML has been used for many years as a fast and efficient way to transport, store and structure information across a wide range of often disparate applications. Researchers at Codenomicon Ltd., a security testing company out of Oulu, Finland, say they found multiple critical flaws in XML “libraries,” chunks of code that are typically used and re-used in software applications to process XML data. Codenomicon is a spinoff from the University of Oulu, and is run by many of the same individuals who in 2001-2002 found and