CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-34868 — This vulnerability allows local attackers to escalate privileges on affected installations of Parallels Desktop 16.1.3-49160

High CVSS 8.8

This vulnerability allows local attackers to escalate privileges on affected installations of Parallels Desktop 16.1.3-49160. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the target guest system in order to exploit this vulnerability. The specific flaw exists within the Toolgate component. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in an uncontrolled memory allocation. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code in the context of the hypervisor. Was ZDI-CAN-13712.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.8 (3.1)
Published
2022-01-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-789

Affected products

  • parallels / parallels / 16.1.3-49160

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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