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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2021-21293 json

Unbounded connection acceptance leads to file handle exhaustion

published 2021-02-02 5 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-xmw9-q7x9-j5qc , EUVD-2021-0580

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.1%
EPSS 2.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 82%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • maven org.http4s:blaze-core_2.11 0.14.15
  • maven org.http4s:blaze-core_2.12 0.14.15
  • maven org.http4s:blaze-core_2.13 0.14.15
  • typelevel blaze 0.14.15

Exploit prediction

2.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 82% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.http4s:blaze-core_2.11
<0.14.15
0.14.15
maven org.http4s:blaze-core_2.12
<0.14.15
0.14.15
maven org.http4s:blaze-core_2.13
<0.14.15
0.14.15

Affected products

  • http4s blaze

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.