CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-9815 — Libtiff Libtiff security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

In LibTIFF 4.0.7, the TIFFReadDirEntryLong8Array function in libtiff/tif_dirread.c mishandles a malloc operation, which allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory leak within the function _TIFFmalloc in tif_unix.c) via a crafted file.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.0)
Published
2017-06-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-772

Affected products

  • libtiff / libtiff / 4.0.7
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04

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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