CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-41687 — DCMTK through 3.6.6 does not handle memory free properly

High CVSS 7.5

DCMTK through 3.6.6 does not handle memory free properly. The program malloc a heap memory for parsing data, but does not free it when error in parsing. Sending specific requests to the dcmqrdb program incur the memory leak. An attacker can use it to launch a DoS attack.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-06-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • offis / dcmtk

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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