CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2016-7166 — Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

libarchive before 3.2.0 does not limit the number of recursive decompressions, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and application crash) via a crafted gzip file.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.0)
Published
2016-09-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399

Affected products

  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_hpc_node / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_hpc_node_eus / 7.2
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server_aus / 7.2
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server_eus / 7.2

Showing 6 representative product identities from 14 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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