CVE-2021-1353

A vulnerability in the IPv4 protocol handling of Cisco StarOS could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to a memory leak that occurs during packet processing. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of crafted IPv4 packets through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the available memory and cause an unexpected restart of the npusim process, leading to a DoS condition on the affected device.

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://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-asr-mem-leak-dos-MTWGHKk3