CVE-2019-9718 Denial of service in n/a

Medium 6.5 Published Updated

Attackers can cause denial of service via CPU exhaustion using crafted Matroska files due to inefficient parsing in the subtitle decoder.

Exploited in the wild
Not known
Login needed
Not needed
Attackable
Over the internet
Victim action needed
A user has to click or open something
Fix
Available

What is CVE-2019-9718?

CVE-2019-9718 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 12 Mar 2019. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

In FFmpeg 3.2 and 4.1, a denial of service in the subtitle decoder allows attackers to hog the CPU via a crafted video file in Matroska format, because ff_htmlmarkup_to_ass in libavcodec/htmlsubtitles.c has a complex format argument to sscanf.

Weakness: CWE-125

Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-9718?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Ffmpeg Ffmpeg.

How do I fix CVE-2019-9718?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

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-2019-9718 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-9718 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as CLEANSTART-2024-AW88517, DEBIAN-CVE-2019-9718, GHSA-423p-f8g4-wmpc, JLSEC-2025-102, UBUNTU-CVE-2019-9718.

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