CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-1903 — Whatsapp Whatsapp security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

An issue when unzipping docx, pptx, and xlsx documents in WhatsApp for iOS prior to v2.20.61 and WhatsApp Business for iOS prior to v2.20.61 could have resulted in an out-of-memory denial of service. This issue would have required the receiver to explicitly open the attachment if it was received from a number not in the receiver's WhatsApp contacts.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • whatsapp / whatsapp
  • whatsapp / whatsapp_business

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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