CVE-2021-41690

DCMTK through 3.6.6 does not handle memory free properly. The malloced memory for storing all file information are recorded in a global variable LST and are not freed properly. Sending specific requests to the dcmqrdb program can incur a 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
• https://github.com/DCMTK/dcmtk
• https://github.com/DCMTK/dcmtk/commit/a9697dfeb672b0b9412c00c7d36d801e27ec85cb
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/06/msg00022.html