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Denial of service due to quadratic complexity in ProcessUTF8Portion

Low
kevinbackhouse published GHSA-w8mv-g8qq-36mj May 16, 2021

Package

Exiv2

Affected versions

< v0.27.4

Patched versions

v0.27.4

Description

Impact

An inefficient algorithm (quadratic complexity) was found in Exiv2 versions v0.27.3 and earlier. Exiv2 is a command-line utility and C++ library for reading, writing, deleting, and modifying the metadata of image files. The inefficient algorithm is triggered when Exiv2 is used to write metadata into 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 writing the metadata, which is a less frequently used Exiv2 operation than reading the metadata. For example, to trigger the bug in the Exiv2 command-line application, you need to add an extra command-line argument such as rm.

Patches

The bug is fixed in version v0.27.4.

References

Fix: #1657

For more information

Please see our security policy for information about Exiv2 security.

Severity

Low
0.0
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Local
Attack complexity
High
Privileges required
None
User interaction
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
None
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:N

CVE ID

CVE-2021-32617

Weaknesses

Credits