CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2026-34962 — Pengutronix Barebox security vulnerability
barebox version prior to 2026.04.0 contains a denial-of-service vulnerability in ext4 directory parsing in fs/ext4/ext4_common.c where the ext4fs_iterate_dir() function fails to validate that directory entry length values are non-zero. Attackers can supply a malicious ext4 filesystem image with a crafted directory entry containing a direntlen value of 0 to cause an infinite loop during directory listing or path resolution, resulting in the boot process hanging indefinitely.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.9 (4.0)
- Published
- 2026-05-11
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-835
Affected products
- pengutronix / barebox
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.