CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2009-5063

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Aug 31, 2011 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
N/A
Source:
NVD
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Memory leak in the embedded_profile_len function in pngwutil.c in libpng before 1.2.39beta5 allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (memory leak or segmentation fault) via a JPEG image containing an iCCP chunk with a negative embedded profile length. NOTE: this is due to an incomplete fix for CVE-2006-7244.

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
Libpng Libpng * 1.2.38 (including)
Libpng Libpng 1.2.39 (including) 1.2.39 (including)
Libpng Libpng 1.2.39-beta1 (including) 1.2.39-beta1 (including)
Libpng Libpng 1.2.39-beta2 (including) 1.2.39-beta2 (including)
Libpng Libpng 1.2.39-beta3 (including) 1.2.39-beta3 (including)
Libpng Libpng 1.2.39-beta4 (including) 1.2.39-beta4 (including)

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