CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-20421 — Exiv2 Exiv2 security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

In Jp2Image::readMetadata() in jp2image.cpp in Exiv2 0.27.2, an input file can result in an infinite loop and hang, with high CPU consumption. Remote attackers could leverage this vulnerability to cause a denial of service via a crafted file.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2020-01-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • exiv2 / exiv2 / 0.27.2
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 19.10
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

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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