CVE-2021-42521: Vtk

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 1.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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 Vtk: up to and including 9.0.0

Published 2022-08-25. Last modified 2026-06-17.