CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-35942 — Gnu Glibc security vulnerability

Critical CVSS 9.1

The wordexp function in the GNU C Library (aka glibc) through 2.33 may crash or read arbitrary memory in parse_param (in posix/wordexp.c) when called with an untrusted, crafted pattern, potentially resulting in a denial of service or disclosure of information. This occurs because atoi was used but strtoul should have been used to ensure correct calculations.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.1 (3.1)
Published
2021-07-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-190, CWE-704

Affected products

  • gnu / glibc
  • netapp / active_iq_unified_manager
  • netapp / e-series_santricity_os_controller
  • netapp / hci_management_node
  • netapp / ontap_select_deploy_administration_utility
  • netapp / solidfire

Showing 6 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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