CVE-2018-0158

A vulnerability in the Internet Key Exchange Version 2 (IKEv2) module of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a memory leak or a reload of an affected device that leads to a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incorrect processing of certain IKEv2 packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted IKEv2 packets to an affected device to be processed. A successful exploit could cause an affected device to continuously consume memory and eventually reload, resulting in a DoS condition. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvf22394.

Weakness

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

Affected Software

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

• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/103566
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1040595
• https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-18-107-03
• https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-18-107-04
• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180328-ike