CVE-2021-34698

A vulnerability in the proxy service of Cisco AsyncOS for Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust system memory and cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper memory management in the proxy service of an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by establishing a large number of HTTPS connections to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the system to stop processing new connections, which could result in a DoS condition. Note: Manual intervention may be required to recover from this situation.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

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

• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-wsa-dos-fmHdKswk