CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-21235 — kamadak-exif is an exif parsing library written in pure Rust
kamadak-exif is an exif parsing library written in pure Rust. In kamadak-exif version 0.5.2, there is an infinite loop in parsing crafted PNG files. Specifically, reader::read_from_container can cause an infinite loop when a crafted PNG file is given. This is fixed in version 0.5.3. No workaround is available. Applications that do not pass files with the PNG signature to Reader::read_from_container are not affected.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-01-06
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400, CWE-835
Affected products
- kamadak-exif_project / kamadak-exif / 0.5.2
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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