CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-20108

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Jul 19, 2021 | Modified: Jul 28, 2021
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

Manage Engine Asset Explorer Agent 1.0.34 listens on port 9000 for incoming commands over HTTPS from Manage Engine Server. The HTTPS certificates are not verified which allows any arbitrary user on the network to send commands over port 9000. While these commands may not be executed (due to authtoken validation), the Asset Explorer agent will reach out to the manage engine server for an HTTP request. During this process, AEAgent.cpp allocates 0x66 bytes using malloc. This memory is never free-ed in the program, causing a memory leak. Additionally, the instruction sent to aeagent (ie: NEWSCAN, DELTASCAN, etc) is converted to a unicode string, but is never freed. These memory leaks allow a remote attacker to exploit a Denial of Service scenario through repetitively sending these commands to an agent and eventually crashing it the agent due to an out-of-memory condition.

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
Manageengine_assetexplorer Zohocorp 1.0.34 (including) 1.0.34 (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