CVE-2019-18809

A memory leak in the af9005_identify_state() function in drivers/media/usb/dvb-usb/af9005.c in the Linux kernel through 5.3.9 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption), aka CID-2289adbfa559.

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://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-12/msg00029.html
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/2289adbfa559050d2a38bcd9caac1c18b800e928
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/03/msg00001.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LYIFGYEDQXP5DVJQQUARQRK2PXKBKQGY/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/YWWOOJKZ4NQYN4RMFIVJ3ZIXKJJI3MKP/
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191205-0001/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4285-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4287-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4287-2/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4300-1/