CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-14170 — Ffmpeg Ffmpeg security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.1

In libavformat/mxfdec.c in FFmpeg 3.3.3 -> 2.4, a DoS in mxf_read_index_entry_array() due to lack of an EOF (End of File) check might cause huge CPU consumption. When a crafted MXF file, which claims a large "nb_index_entries" field in the header but does not contain sufficient backing data, is provided, the loop would consume huge CPU resources, since there is no EOF check inside the loop. Moreover, this big loop can be invoked multiple times if there is more than one applicable data segment in the crafted MXF file.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.1 (2.0)
Published
2017-09-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-834

Affected products

  • ffmpeg / ffmpeg / 3.3.3

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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