CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-29385 — GNOME gdk-pixbuf (aka GdkPixbuf) before 2.42.2 allows a denial of service (infinite loop) in lzw.c in the function write_indexes

Medium CVSS 5.5

GNOME gdk-pixbuf (aka GdkPixbuf) before 2.42.2 allows a denial of service (infinite loop) in lzw.c in the function write_indexes. if c->self_code equals 10, self->code_table[10].extends will assign the value 11 to c. The next execution in the loop will assign self->code_table[11].extends to c, which will give the value of 10. This will make the loop run infinitely. This bug can, for example, be triggered by calling this function with a GIF image with LZW compression that is crafted in a special way.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-12-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • gnome / gdk-pixbuf
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 20.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 20.10
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 34

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.