CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-40114

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Oct 27, 2021 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
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

Multiple Cisco products are affected by a vulnerability in the way the Snort detection engine processes ICMP traffic that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to improper memory resource management while the Snort detection engine is processing ICMP packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of ICMP packets through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources on the affected device, causing the device to reload.

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
Firepower_management_center Cisco 2.9.14.0 (including) 2.9.14.0 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 2.9.15 (including) 2.9.15 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 2.9.16 (including) 2.9.16 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 2.9.17 (including) 2.9.17 (including)
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco * 6.4.0.12 (excluding)
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco 6.5.0 (including) 6.6.3 (excluding)
Firepower_threat_defense Cisco 6.7.0 (including) 6.7.0.2 (excluding)
Unified_threat_defense Cisco 16.12 (including) 16.12.6 (excluding)
Unified_threat_defense Cisco 17.3 (including) 17.3.4a (excluding)
Unified_threat_defense Cisco 17.4 (including) 17.4.2 (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