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Not in CISA KEV
HIGH severity

CVE-2021-35517 — commons-compress

HIGH

CVE-2021-35517 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-130 vulnerability in org.apache.commons:commons-compress. EPSS puts its 30-day exploitation probability at 10.6% (96th percentile). A fix is available for org.apache.commons:commons-compress — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Improper Handling of Length Parameter Inconsistency in Compress

Also known asGHSA-xqfj-vm6h-2x34
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 29, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
10.6%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Moderate Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs96th percentile — riskier than 96% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%4.62%9.24%13.9%1.1%10.6%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

Where this sits among everything scored

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
☕org.apache.commons:commons-compress

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Maven packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

When reading a specially crafted TAR archive, Compress can be made to allocate large amounts of memory that finally leads to an out of memory error even for very small inputs. This could be used to mount a denial of service attack against services that use Compress' tar package.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
☕Mavenorg.apache.commons:commons-compressall versions1.21org.apache.commons:commons-compress:1.21

Affected Products

27 products · 54 configurations
Application
commons compressapache
≥ 1.1 && ≤ 1.20
range
Application
active iq unified managernetapp
all
Application
oncommand insightnetapp
all
Application
banking apisoracle
≥ 18.1 && ≤ 18.3
4 versions
19.119.220.121.1
Application
banking digital experienceoracle
≥ 18.1 && ≤ 18.3
4 versions
19.119.220.121.1
Application
banking enterprise default managementoracle
1 version
2.7.0

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for org.apache.commons:commons-compress, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update org.apache.commons:commons-compress to 1.21 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2021-35517 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. Workarounds

    Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.

Fixing This On Your OS

If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.

Red HatModerate
ProductFixed inAdvisory
Red Hat Fuse 7.11apache-commons-compressRHSA-2022:5532
Red Hat Virtualization Engine 4.4apache-commons-compress-0:1.21-1.2.el8evRHSA-2022:5555

Frequently Asked Questions

When reading a specially crafted TAR archive, Compress can be made to allocate large amounts of memory that finally leads to an out of memory error even for very small inputs. This could be used to mount a denial of service attack against services that use Compress' tar package.
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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CVE-2021-35517: commons-compress DoS — Fixed in 1.21