CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-32623 — Opencast is a free and open source solution for automated video capture and distribution

High CVSS 8.1

Opencast is a free and open source solution for automated video capture and distribution. Versions of Opencast prior to 9.6 are vulnerable to the billion laughs attack, which allows an attacker to easily execute a (seemingly permanent) denial of service attack, essentially taking down Opencast using a single HTTP request. To exploit this, users need to have ingest privileges, limiting the group of potential attackers The problem has been fixed in Opencast 9.6. There is no known workaround for this issue.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.1 (3.1)
Published
2021-06-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-776

Affected products

  • apereo / opencast

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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