CVE-2023-42981 Denial of service in macOS

What is CVE-2023-42981?

CVE-2023-42981 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apple Macos, published on 11 Apr 2025. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Processing a file may lead to a denial-of-service or potentially disclose memory contents. This issue is fixed in macOS 14. The issue was addressed with improved checks.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-42981?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Apple Macos.

How do I fix CVE-2023-42981?

No fix has been published for CVE-2023-42981 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

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-2023-42981 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-42981 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Apple Macos

• CVE-2026-65400 Apple macOS Improper Authentication Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-44146 Security feature bypass in macOS Critical 10.0
• CVE-2024-44148 Security feature bypass in macOS Critical 10.0
• CVE-2023-38586 Security feature bypass in macOS Critical 10.0
• CVE-2023-40455 Security feature bypass in macOS Critical 10.0

All Apple Macos vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-fc78-895f-8fh8.