CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-34966 — An infinite loop vulnerability was found in Samba's mdssvc RPC service for Spotlight

High CVSS 7.5

An infinite loop vulnerability was found in Samba's mdssvc RPC service for Spotlight. When parsing Spotlight mdssvc RPC packets sent by the client, the core unmarshalling function sl_unpack_loop() did not validate a field in the network packet that contains the count of elements in an array-like structure. By passing 0 as the count value, the attacked function will run in an endless loop consuming 100% CPU. This flaw allows an attacker to issue a malformed RPC request, triggering an infinite loop, resulting in a denial of service condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-07-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • samba / samba
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 37
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 38
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 11.0

Showing 6 representative product identities from 9 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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