CVE-2018-15377

A vulnerability in the Cisco Network Plug and Play agent, also referred to as the Cisco Open Plug-n-Play agent, of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a memory leak on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation by the affected software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending invalid data to the Cisco Network Plug and Play agent on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a memory leak on the affected device, which could cause the device to reload.

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

• https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-19-094-02
• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180926-pnp-memleak