CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-20216

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Mar 25, 2021 | Modified: Aug 05, 2022
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
7.8 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A flaw was found in Privoxy in versions before 3.0.31. A memory leak that occurs when decompression fails unexpectedly may lead to a denial of service. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

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 * *

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