CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-3189

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: May 06, 2020 | Modified: Aug 12, 2021
CVSS 3.x
8.6
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/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

A vulnerability in the VPN System Logging functionality for Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a memory leak that can deplete system memory over time, which can cause unexpected system behaviors or device crashes. The vulnerability is due to the system memory not being properly freed for a VPN System Logging event generated when a VPN session is created or deleted. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by repeatedly creating or deleting a VPN tunnel connection, which could leak a small amount of system memory for each logging event. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause system memory depletion, which can lead to a systemwide denial of service (DoS) condition. The attacker does not have any control of whether VPN System Logging is configured or not on the device, but it is enabled by default.

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
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco 6.2.3.12 (including) 6.2.3.12 (including)
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco 6.2.3.13 (including) 6.2.3.13 (including)
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco 6.2.3.14 (including) 6.2.3.14 (including)
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco 6.2.3.15 (including) 6.2.3.15 (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