CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-31553 — An issue was discovered in the CheckUser extension for MediaWiki through 1.35.2

Medium CVSS 6.5

An issue was discovered in the CheckUser extension for MediaWiki through 1.35.2. MediaWiki usernames with trailing whitespace could be stored in the cu_log database table such that denial of service occurred for certain CheckUser extension pages and functionality. For example, the attacker could turn off Special:CheckUserLog and thus interfere with usage tracking.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-04-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-428

Affected products

  • mediawiki / mediawiki

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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