CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-14150 — GNU Bison before 3.5.4 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash)

Medium CVSS 5.5

GNU Bison before 3.5.4 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash). NOTE: there is a risk only if Bison is used with untrusted input, and an observed bug happens to cause unsafe behavior with a specific compiler/architecture. The bug reports were intended to show that a crash may occur in Bison itself, not that a crash may occur in code that is generated by Bison.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-06-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application

Affected products

  • gnu / bison

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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