CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2017-9538 — Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor security vulnerability
The 'Upload logo from external path' function of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor version 12.0.15300.90 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (permanent display of a "Cannot exit above the top directory" error message throughout the entire web application) via a ".." in the path field. In other words, the denial of service is caused by an incorrect implementation of a directory-traversal protection mechanism.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 4.9 (3.0)
- Published
- 2017-10-03
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20
Affected products
- solarwinds / network_performance_monitor
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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