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Fencer Vulns
low 3.7

CVE-2019-14850 json

A denial of service vulnerability was discovered in nbdkit 1.12.7, 1.14.1 and 1.15.1.

published 2021-03-18 5 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-5973

cvss
3.7
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.6%
EPSS 1.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 75%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A denial of service vulnerability was discovered in nbdkit 1.12.7, 1.14.1 and 1.15.1. An attacker could connect to the nbdkit service and cause it to perform a large amount of work in initializing backend plugins, by simply opening a connection to the service. This vulnerability could cause resource consumption and degradation of service in nbdkit, depending on the plugins configured on the server-side.

Patch / fix

  • nbdkit_project nbdkit 1.12.7, 1.14.1, 1.15.1
  • nbdkit Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.14.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2019-14850

  • nbdkit RHEL 7 1.8.0-3.el7
  • nbdkit-plugin-vddk RHEL 7 1.8.0-3.el7
  • nbdkit-basic-plugins RHEL 7 1.8.0-3.el7
  • nbdkit-plugin-python2 RHEL 7 1.8.0-3.el7
  • nbdkit-example-plugins RHEL 7 1.8.0-3.el7
  • nbdkit-plugin-python-common RHEL 7 1.8.0-3.el7

red hat advisories RHSA-2020:1167

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2019-14850 updated cvss 3.7

nbdkit: denial of service due to premature opening of back-end connection

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 nbdkit, nbdkit-server, nbdkit-plugin-xz, nbdkit-xz-filter, nbdkit-nbd-plugin, nbdkit-ssh-plugin, +17 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Advanced Virtualization nbdkit, nbdkit-server, nbdkit-plugin-xz, nbdkit-xz-filter, nbdkit-nbd-plugin, nbdkit-ssh-plugin, +17 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available
  • Red Hat Virtualization 4 nbdkit, nbdkit-plugin-vddk, nbdkit-basic-plugins, nbdkit-plugin-python2, nbdkit-plugin-python-common
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7) nbdkit 1.8.0-3.el7, nbdkit-plugin-vddk 1.8.0-3.el7, nbdkit-plugin-python2 1.8.0-3.el7, nbdkit-plugin-python-common 1.8.0-3.el7 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Optional (v. 7) nbdkit-basic-plugins 1.8.0-3.el7, nbdkit-example-plugins 1.8.0-3.el7
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2020:1167
  • Red Hat Virtualization 4 redhat-virtualization-host-image-update
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.60% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 75% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2019-September/msg00084.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 2.0 2.6 AV:N/AC:H/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Affected products

  • n/a nbdkit

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-406 Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification)

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.