CVE-2019-19055

A memory leak in the nl80211_get_ftm_responder_stats() function in net/wireless/nl80211.c in the Linux kernel through 5.3.11 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by triggering nl80211hdr_put() failures, aka CID-1399c59fa929. NOTE: third parties dispute the relevance of this because it occurs on a code path where a successful allocation has already occurred

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://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157319
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1399c59fa92984836db90538cf92397fe7caaa57
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/O3PSDE6PTOTVBK2YTKB2TFQP2SUBVSNF/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PY7LJMSPAGRIKABJPDKQDTXYW3L5RX2T/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4225-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4225-2/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4226-1/