CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-34334 — Exiv2 is a command-line utility and C++ library for reading, writing, deleting, and modifying the metadata of image files

Medium CVSS 5.5

Exiv2 is a command-line utility and C++ library for reading, writing, deleting, and modifying the metadata of image files. An infinite loop is triggered when Exiv2 is used to read the metadata of a crafted image file. An attacker could potentially exploit the vulnerability to cause a denial of service, if they can trick the victim into running Exiv2 on a crafted image file. The bug is fixed in version v0.27.5.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-09
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • exiv2 / exiv2
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 34
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

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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