CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-3764

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Aug 23, 2022 | Modified: Aug 25, 2022
CVSS 3.x
5.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A memory leak flaw was found in the Linux kernels ccp_run_aes_gcm_cmd() function that allows an attacker to cause a denial of service. The vulnerability is similar to the older CVE-2019-18808. 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
Linux_kernel Linux * 5.14.20 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.15 (including) 5.15 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.15-rc1 (including) 5.15-rc1 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.15-rc2 (including) 5.15-rc2 (including)
Linux_kernel Linux 5.15-rc3 (including) 5.15-rc3 (including)

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