CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2005-3181

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Oct 12, 2005 | Modified: Jan 26, 2024
CVSS 3.x
N/A
Source:
NVD
CVSS 2.x
2.1 LOW
AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

The audit system in Linux kernel 2.6.6, and other versions before 2.6.13.4, when CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL is enabled, uses an incorrect function to free names_cache memory, which prevents the memory from being tracked by AUDITSYSCALL code and leads to a memory leak that allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption).

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Linux_kernel Linux 2.6.0 2.6.13.3

Potential Mitigations

  • Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
  • For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
  • When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
  • To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References