CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-27755 — Imagemagick Imagemagick security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.3

in SetImageExtent() of /MagickCore/image.c, an incorrect image depth size can cause a memory leak because the code which checks for the proper image depth size does not reset the size in the event there is an invalid size. The patch resets the depth to a proper size before throwing an exception. The memory leak can be triggered by a crafted input file that is processed by ImageMagick and could cause an impact to application reliability, such as denial of service. This flaw affects ImageMagick versions prior to 7.0.9-0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.3 (2.0)
Published
2020-12-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • imagemagick / imagemagick

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

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