CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-12049 — An issue was discovered in dbus >= 1.3.0 before 1.12.18

Medium CVSS 5.5

An issue was discovered in dbus >= 1.3.0 before 1.12.18. The DBusServer in libdbus, as used in dbus-daemon, leaks file descriptors when a message exceeds the per-message file descriptor limit. A local attacker with access to the D-Bus system bus or another system service's private AF_UNIX socket could use this to make the system service reach its file descriptor limit, denying service to subsequent D-Bus clients.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-06-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-404

Affected products

  • freedesktop / dbus
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 12.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 19.10

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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