CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-3821 — An off-by-one Error issue was discovered in Systemd in format_timespan() function of time-util.c

Medium CVSS 5.5

An off-by-one Error issue was discovered in Systemd in format_timespan() function of time-util.c. An attacker could supply specific values for time and accuracy that leads to buffer overrun in format_timespan(), leading to a Denial of Service.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-11-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-193

Affected products

  • systemd_project / systemd
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 9.0
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 35

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.