CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-34431

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Jul 22, 2021 | Modified: Aug 03, 2021
CVSS 3.x
6.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
4 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

In Eclipse Mosquitto version 1.6 to 2.0.10, if an authenticated client that had connected with MQTT v5 sent a crafted CONNECT message to the broker a memory leak would occur, which could be used to provide a DoS attack against the broker.

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
Mosquitto Eclipse 1.6 (including) 2.0.10 (including)
Mosquitto Ubuntu bionic *
Mosquitto Ubuntu esm-apps/focal *
Mosquitto Ubuntu focal *
Mosquitto Ubuntu groovy *
Mosquitto Ubuntu hirsute *
Mosquitto Ubuntu impish *
Mosquitto Ubuntu kinetic *
Mosquitto Ubuntu trusty *
Mosquitto Ubuntu upstream *
Mosquitto 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