A flaw was found in Privoxy in versions before 3.0.29. Memory leaks in the show-status CGI handler when memory allocations fail can lead to a system crash.
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 |
| Privoxy |
Privoxy |
* |
3.0.29 (excluding) |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
bionic |
* |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
focal |
* |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
groovy |
* |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
trusty |
* |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
trusty/esm |
* |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
upstream |
* |
| Privoxy |
Ubuntu |
xenial |
* |
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