A memory leak in the ca8210_probe() function in drivers/net/ieee802154/ca8210.c in the Linux kernel before 5.3.8 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by triggering ca8210_get_platform_data() failures, aka CID-6402939ec86e.
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 |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.12 (including) |
4.14.151 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.15 (including) |
4.19.81 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.20 (including) |
5.3.8 (excluding) |
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