CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-3815

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Jan 28, 2019 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
3.3
LOW
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS 2.x
2.1 LOW
AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
3.3 LOW
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

A memory leak was discovered in the backport of fixes for CVE-2018-16864 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Function dispatch_message_real() in journald-server.c does not free the memory allocated by set_iovec_field_free() to store the _CMDLINE= entry. A local attacker may use this flaw to make systemd-journald crash. This issue only affects versions shipped with Red Hat Enterprise since v219-62.2.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Openshift_container_platform Redhat 3.11 (including) 3.11 (including)
Enterprise_linux_desktop Redhat 7.0 (including) 7.0 (including)
Enterprise_linux_server Redhat 7.0 (including) 7.0 (including)
Enterprise_linux_server_aus Redhat 7.6 (including) 7.6 (including)
Enterprise_linux_server_eus Redhat 7.6 (including) 7.6 (including)
Enterprise_linux_workstation Redhat 7.0 (including) 7.0 (including)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RedHat systemd-0:219-62.el7_6.3 *

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