CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-16845 — F5 Nginx security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.2

nginx before versions 1.15.6, 1.14.1 has a vulnerability in the ngx_http_mp4_module, which might allow an attacker to cause infinite loop in a worker process, cause a worker process crash, or might result in worker process memory disclosure by using a specially crafted mp4 file. The issue only affects nginx if it is built with the ngx_http_mp4_module (the module is not built by default) and the .mp4. directive is used in the configuration file. Further, the attack is only possible if an attacker is able to trigger processing of a specially crafted mp4 file with the ngx_http_mp4_module.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.2 (3.0)
Published
2018-11-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-835

Affected products

  • f5 / nginx
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04

Showing 6 representative product identities from 10 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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