CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-5784 — In LibTIFF 4.0.9, there is an uncontrolled resource consumption in the TIFFSetDirectory function of tif_dir.c

Medium CVSS 6.5

In LibTIFF 4.0.9, there is an uncontrolled resource consumption in the TIFFSetDirectory function of tif_dir.c. Remote attackers could leverage this vulnerability to cause a denial of service via a crafted tif file. This occurs because the declared number of directory entries is not validated against the actual number of directory entries.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.0)
Published
2018-01-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • libtiff / libtiff / 4.0.9
  • debian / debian_linux / 7.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04

Showing 6 representative product identities from 7 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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