CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-16865 — Systemd Project Systemd security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

An allocation of memory without limits, that could result in the stack clashing with another memory region, was discovered in systemd-journald when many entries are sent to the journal socket. A local attacker, or a remote one if systemd-journal-remote is used, may use this flaw to crash systemd-journald or execute code with journald privileges. Versions through v240 are vulnerable.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2019-01-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • systemd_project / systemd
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server_aus / 7.3
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server_aus / 7.6
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server_eus / 7.5

Showing 6 representative product identities from 20 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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