Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting exiv2/exiv2 package, versions [,0.27.99.0)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.13% (49th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-EXIV2EXIV2-2367077
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed9 Aug 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 9 Aug 2021

CVE-2021-37622  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-835  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade exiv2/exiv2 to version 0.27.99.0 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). Exiv2 is a command-line utility and C++ library for reading, writing, deleting, and modifying the metadata of image files. An infinite loop was found in Exiv2 versions v0.27.4 and earlier. The infinite loop is triggered when Exiv2 is used to modify the metadata of a crafted image file. An attacker could potentially exploit the vulnerability to cause a denial of service, if they can trick the victim into running Exiv2 on a crafted image file. Note that this bug is only triggered when deleting the IPTC data, which is a less frequently used Exiv2 operation that requires an extra command line option (-d I rm). The bug is fixed in version v0.27.5.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

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