CVE-2021-38576 Denial of service in EDK II

What is CVE-2021-38576?

CVE-2021-38576 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in EDK II, published on 3 Jan 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A BIOS bug in firmware for a particular PC model leaves the Platform authorization value empty. This can be used to permanently brick the TPM in multiple ways, as well as to non-permanently DoS the system.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-38576?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Tianocore Edk2.

How do I fix CVE-2021-38576?

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-2021-38576 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-38576 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in EDK II

• CVE-2023-45230 Buffer Overflow in EDK II Network Package High 8.3
• CVE-2023-45234 Buffer Overflow in EDK II Network Package High 8.3
• CVE-2023-45235 Buffer Overflow in EDK II Network Package High 8.3
• CVE-2021-28210 Denial of service in EDK II High 7.8
• CVE-2019-14584 Null dereference in Tianocore EDK2 High 7.8

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2021-38576, GHSA-h53v-fr53-7vvj, OESA-2022-1515, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-38576.