CVE-2021-42715 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2021-42715?

CVE-2021-42715 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 21 Oct 2021. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

An issue was discovered in stb stb_image.h 1.33 through 2.27. The HDR loader parsed truncated end-of-file RLE scanlines as an infinite sequence of zero-length runs. An attacker could potentially have caused denial of service in applications using stb_image by submitting crafted HDR files.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-42715?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Nothings Stb Image.h.

How do I fix CVE-2021-42715?

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-2021-42715 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-42715 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 DEBIAN-CVE-2021-42715, GHSA-x76g-p4rm-4xch, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-42715.