CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-38387 — Contiki-Os Contiki security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

In Contiki 3.0, a Telnet server that silently quits (before disconnection with clients) leads to connected clients entering an infinite loop and waiting forever, which may cause excessive CPU consumption.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • contiki-os / contiki / 3.0

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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