CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-38569 — An issue was discovered in Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF before 10.1.4
High
CVSS 7.5
An issue was discovered in Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF before 10.1.4. It allows stack consumption via recursive function calls during the handling of XFA forms or link objects.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-08-11
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-674
Affected products
- foxitsoftware / foxit_reader
- foxitsoftware / phantompdf
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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