What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-42521

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2022-08-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

There is a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability in VTK before 9.2.5, and it lies in IO/Infovis/vtkXMLTreeReader.cxx. The vendor didn't check the return value of libxml2 API 'xmlDocGetRootElement', and try to dereference it. It is unsafe as the return value can be NULL and that NULL pointer dereference may crash the application.

Affected products

• vtk: through 9.0.0

References

• https://discourse.vtk.org/t/vtk-9-2-5-is-out/10549
• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/issues/17818
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PCTMSAAVP4BW2HTZLDWMGKZ2WEC5OFLK/
• https://discourse.vtk.org/t/vtk-9-2-5-is-out/10549
• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/issues/17818
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PCTMSAAVP4BW2HTZLDWMGKZ2WEC5OFLK/

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