CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-21296 — Fleet is an open source osquery manager
Fleet is an open source osquery manager. In Fleet before version 3.7.0 a malicious actor with a valid node key can send a badly formatted request that causes the Fleet server to exit, resulting in denial of service. This is possible only while a live query is currently ongoing. We believe the impact of this vulnerability to be low given the requirement that the actor has a valid node key. There is no information disclosure, privilege escalation, or code execution. The issue is fixed in Fleet 3.7.0.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 4 (2.0)
- Published
- 2021-02-10
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- fleetdm / fleet
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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