CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-41380 — RealVNC Viewer 6.21.406 allows remote VNC servers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via crafted RFB protocol data

Medium CVSS 6.5

RealVNC Viewer 6.21.406 allows remote VNC servers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via crafted RFB protocol data. NOTE: It is asserted that this issue requires social engineering a user into connecting to a fake VNC Server. The VNC Viewer application they are using will then hang, until terminated, but no memory leak occurs - the resources are freed once the hung process is terminated and the resource usage is constant during the hang. Only the process that is connected to the fake Server is affected. This is an application bug, not a security issue

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • realvnc / vnc_viewer / 6.21.406

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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