CVE-2021-32037 User may trigger invariant when allowed to send commands directly to shards

What is CVE-2021-32037?

CVE-2021-32037 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Mongodb Mongodb, published on 24 Nov 2021. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An authorized user may trigger an invariant which may result in denial of service or server exit if a relevant aggregation request is sent to a shard. Usually, the requests are sent via mongos and special privileges are required in order to know the address of the shards and to log in to the shards of an auth enabled environment. This issue affects MongoDB Server v5.0 versions prior to and including 5.0.2.

Weakness: CWE-617

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-32037?

1 open source package ship an affected version, including mongodb. It affects 1 product.

Products include Mongodb Mongodb.

How do I fix CVE-2021-32037?

Upgrade mongodb to 5.0.3 or later.

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-2021-32037 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-32037 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Mongodb Mongodb

• CVE-2025-14847 MongoDB and MongoDB Server Improper Handling of Length Parameter Inconsistency Exploited High 8.7
• CVE-2026-82067 Auth bypass in MongoDB Server Critical 9.2
• CVE-2026-13072 MongoDB Improper Input Validation in Compute Mode External Data Processing Leading to Memory Corruption Critical 9.2
• CVE-2017-15535 Denial of service in n/a Critical 9.1
• CVE-2026-18691 Improper Authentication in MongoDB Intra-Cluster Connections Allows Credential Exposure Critical 9.0

All Mongodb Mongodb vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as BIT-mongodb-2021-32037, GHSA-8v5c-chfg-fcjx.