KDC in MIT Kerberos 5 (krb5kdc) does not set a global variable for some krb4 message types, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted messages that trigger a NULL pointer dereference or double-free.
Weakness
The product does not initialize or incorrectly initializes a resource, which might leave the resource in an unexpected state when it is accessed or used.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Kerberos_5 |
Mit |
* |
1.6.3 (including) |
Potential Mitigations
- Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
- For example, in Java, if the programmer does not explicitly initialize a variable, then the code could produce a compile-time error (if the variable is local) or automatically initialize the variable to the default value for the variable’s type. In Perl, if explicit initialization is not performed, then a default value of undef is assigned, which is interpreted as 0, false, or an equivalent value depending on the context in which the variable is accessed.
References