CVE-2021-41687

DCMTK through 3.6.6 does not handle memory free properly. The program malloc a heap memory for parsing data, but does not free it when error in parsing. Sending specific requests to the dcmqrdb program incur the memory leak. An attacker can use it to launch a DoS attack.

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/DCMTK/dcmtk
• https://github.com/DCMTK/dcmtk/commit/a9697dfeb672b0b9412c00c7d36d801e27ec85cb
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/06/msg00022.html