CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-27174 — Amazon Firecracker security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

In Amazon AWS Firecracker before 0.21.3, and 0.22.x before 0.22.1, the serial console buffer can grow its memory usage without limit when data is sent to the standard input. This can result in a memory leak on the microVM emulation thread, possibly occupying more memory than intended on the host.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • amazon / firecracker

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.