CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-16949

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Oct 16, 2020 | Modified: Dec 31, 2023
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

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
Windows_10 Microsoft - (including) - (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 1607 (including) 1607 (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 1709 (including) 1709 (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 1803 (including) 1803 (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 1809 (including) 1809 (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 1903 (including) 1903 (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 1909 (including) 1909 (including)
Windows_10 Microsoft 2004 (including) 2004 (including)
Windows_7 Microsoft –sp1 (including) –sp1 (including)
Windows_8.1 Microsoft - (including) - (including)
Windows_rt_8.1 Microsoft - (including) - (including)
Windows_server_2008 Microsoft –sp2 (including) –sp2 (including)
Windows_server_2008 Microsoft r2-sp1 (including) r2-sp1 (including)
Windows_server_2012 Microsoft - (including) - (including)
Windows_server_2012 Microsoft r2 (including) r2 (including)
Windows_server_2016 Microsoft - (including) - (including)
Windows_server_2016 Microsoft 1903 (including) 1903 (including)
Windows_server_2016 Microsoft 1909 (including) 1909 (including)
Windows_server_2016 Microsoft 2004 (including) 2004 (including)
Windows_server_2019 Microsoft - (including) - (including)

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