CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-16949 — An issue was discovered in OpenAFS before 1.6.23 and 1.8.x before 1.8.2

High CVSS 7.5

An issue was discovered in OpenAFS before 1.6.23 and 1.8.x before 1.8.2. Several data types used as RPC input variables were implemented as unbounded array types, limited only by the inherent 32-bit length field to 4 GB. An unauthenticated attacker could send, or claim to send, large input values and consume server resources waiting for those inputs, denying service to other valid connections.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.0)
Published
2018-09-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • openafs / openafs
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0

Showing 3 representative product identities from 4 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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