Wire ServerApplication · Wire

CVE-2021-41119

HIGH · 7.5 CVSS v3.1 Published 2022-04-13
Fix available
A fix is available. Upgrade to 2022-03-01 or later.
See remediation →
84/100
Remediation priority · High
Public exploit Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
Wire-server is the system server for the wire back-end services. Releases prior to v2022-03-01 are subject to a denial of service attack via a crafted object causing a hash collision. This collision causes the server to spend at least quadratic time parsing it which can lead to a denial of service for a heavily used server. The issue has been fixed in wire-server 2022-03-01 and is already deployed on all Wire managed services. On premise instances of wire-server need to be updated to 2022-03-01, so that their backends are no longer affected. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-400

A single request can consume unbounded CPU, memory, or connections, so a modest amount of malicious traffic exhausts the service. The result is denial of service for everyone else. Remediation is enforcing limits, quotas, and timeouts on what any one request can use.

General guidance for the uncontrolled resource consumption class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.

NVD · CPE data
Wire ServerApplication
Affected:< 2022-03-01

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Upgrade available Upgrade to 2022-03-01 or later
Fixed in 2022-03-01
Recommended fix Moderate confidence

wire-server v2022-03-01

  1. 1. Backup your current Wire Server configuration and data
  2. 2. Stop the Wire Server services
  3. 3. Update Wire Server to version 2022-03-01 or later using your deployment method (e.g., Helm chart, Docker image, or package manager)
  4. 4. Verify the new version is running: check the version string matches v2022-03-01 or newer
  5. 5. Restart all Wire Server components
  6. 6. Monitor system performance to confirm the DoS vulnerability is remediated

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

We can perform the upgrade in your staging environment and verify nothing breaks — typical engagement from $1,950. Get the upgrade done

Scan for this in your stack

Free · runs locally
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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2021-41119 in production — separate from our analysis above.

No notes yet

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What this is

A place for practitioners to share what actually worked: a mitigation you’ve tested, a configuration change, a version- or environment-specific caveat, or a link to a verified patch. The most useful notes rise to the top as peers upvote them, so the signal stays high.

What belongs here
  • Verified mitigations, workarounds, and config changes
  • Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
  • No weaponised exploit code, or anything meant to cause harm
  • No spam, self-promotion, credentials, or personal data