CVE-2014-8121 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2014-8121?

CVE-2014-8121 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 27 Mar 2015. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

DB_LOOKUP in nss_files/files-XXX.c in the Name Service Switch (NSS) in GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) 2.21 and earlier does not properly check if a file is open, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) by performing a look-up on a database while iterating over it, which triggers the file pointer to be reset.

Weakness: CWE-17

Which versions are affected by CVE-2014-8121?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Gnu Glibc, Suse Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, Suse Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

How do I fix CVE-2014-8121?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2014-8121 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2014-8121 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2014-8121, GHSA-hw66-pxhg-8fx8, UBUNTU-CVE-2014-8121.