CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-30844

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Oct 19, 2021 | Modified: Oct 11, 2022
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A logic issue was addressed with improved state management. This issue is fixed in Security Update 2021-005 Catalina, macOS Big Sur 11.6. A remote attacker may be able to leak memory.

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
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15 (including) 10.15.6 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7 (including) 10.15.7 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2020 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2020 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2020-001 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2020-001 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2020-005 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2020-005 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2020-007 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2020-007 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2021-001 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2021-001 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2021-002 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2021-002 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2021-003 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2021-003 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-security_update_2021-006 (including) 10.15.7-security_update_2021-006 (including)
Mac_os_x Apple 10.15.7-supplemental_update (including) 10.15.7-supplemental_update (including)
Macos Apple * 11.6.1 (excluding)

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