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CVE-2021-21293

HighCVSS 7.5 / 10
Published Feb 2, 2021·Last modified Apr 10, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

blaze is a Scala library for building asynchronous pipelines, with a focus on network IO. All servers running blaze-core before version 0.14.15 are affected by a vulnerability in which unbounded connection acceptance leads to file handle exhaustion. Blaze, accepts connections unconditionally on a dedicated thread pool. This has the net effect of amplifying degradation in services that are unable to handle their current request load, since incoming connections are still accepted and added to an unbounded queue. Each connection allocates a socket handle, which drains a scarce OS resource. This can also confound higher level circuit breakers which work based on detecting failed connections. The vast majority of affected users are using it as part of http4s-blaze-server <= 0.21.16. http4s provides a mechanism for limiting open connections, but is enforced inside the Blaze accept loop, after the connection is accepted and the socket opened. Thus, the limit only prevents the number of connections which can be simultaneously processed, not the number of connections which can be held open. The issue is fixed in version 0.14.15 for "NIO1SocketServerGroup". A "maxConnections" parameter is added, with a default value of 512. Concurrent connections beyond this limit are rejected. To run unbounded, which is not recommended, set a negative number. The "NIO2SocketServerGroup" has no such setting and is now deprecated. There are several possible workarounds described in the refrenced GitHub Advisory GHSA-xmw9-q7x9-j5qc.

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.5

The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.

Threat Intelligence
6.9

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
2.12%

The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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