CVE-2021-20298 Denial of service in OpenEXR

What is CVE-2021-20298?

CVE-2021-20298 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 23 Aug 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A flaw was found in OpenEXR's B44Compressor. This flaw allows an attacker who can submit a crafted file to be processed by OpenEXR, to exhaust all memory accessible to the application. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Weakness: CWE-787, CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-20298?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Openexr Openexr.

How do I fix CVE-2021-20298?

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-2021-20298 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-20298 in the wild and no public exploit code.

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All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2021-20298, GHSA-c8fj-ggrc-c3hc, OESA-2022-1884, OESA-2022-1885, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-20298.