What is CVE-2021-3478?

CVE-2021-3478 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Openexr, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2021-03-31.

How severe is CVE-2021-3478?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.

Resource exhaustion in Openexr

CVE-2021-3478

There's a flaw in OpenEXR's scanline input file functionality in versions before 3.0.0-beta. An attacker able to submit a crafted file to be processed by OpenEXR could consume excessive system memory. The greatest impact of this flaw is to system availability.

Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)

Published 2021-03-31 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.010 (60.0th percentile), scored 2026-09-29.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 60th percentile — 60.0% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.010 · newest: 0.010 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Openexr
Debian Linux — versions 9.0, 10.0
Openexr — versions OpenEXR 3.0.0-beta

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi (Patch, Third Party Advisory, Issue Tracking)
bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/detail (Third Party Advisory, Issue Tracking)
lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/07/msg00001.html (mailing-list, Third Party Advisory)
security.gentoo.org/glsa/202107-27 (vendor-advisory, Third Party Advisory)
lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/12/msg00022.html (mailing-list, Mailing List, Third Party Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2021-3478?: CVE-2021-3478 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Openexr, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2021-03-31.
How severe is CVE-2021-3478?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.