CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-20255 — A stack overflow via an infinite recursion vulnerability was found in the eepro100 i8255x device emulator of QEMU

Medium CVSS 5.5

A stack overflow via an infinite recursion vulnerability was found in the eepro100 i8255x device emulator of QEMU. This issue occurs while processing controller commands due to a DMA reentry issue. This flaw allows a guest user or process to consume CPU cycles or crash the QEMU process on the host, resulting in a denial of service. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-03-09
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835, CWE-674

Affected products

  • qemu / qemu
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0

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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