CVE-2021-41145

FreeSWITCH is a Software Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation from proprietary telecom switches to a software implementation that runs on any commodity hardware. FreeSWITCH prior to version 1.10.7 is susceptible to Denial of Service via SIP flooding. When flooding FreeSWITCH with SIP messages, it was observed that after a number of seconds the process was killed by the operating system due to memory exhaustion. By abusing this vulnerability, an attacker is able to crash any FreeSWITCH instance by flooding it with SIP messages, leading to Denial of Service. The attack does not require authentication and can be carried out over UDP, TCP or TLS. This issue was patched in version 1.10.7.

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://github.com/signalwire/freeswitch/releases/tag/v1.10.7
• https://github.com/signalwire/freeswitch/security/advisories/GHSA-jvpq-23v4-gp3m