CVE-2021-38291 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2021-38291?

CVE-2021-38291 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 12 Aug 2021. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

FFmpeg version (git commit de8e6e67e7523e48bb27ac224a0b446df05e1640) suffers from a an assertion failure at src/libavutil/mathematics.c.

Weakness: CWE-617

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-38291?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Ffmpeg Ffmpeg.

How do I fix CVE-2021-38291?

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-2021-38291 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-38291 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as CLEANSTART-2024-LL34532, DEBIAN-CVE-2021-38291, GHSA-4525-66vv-3hwf, JLSEC-2025-117, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-38291.