An issue was discovered function make_tempdir, and make_tempname in bucomm.c in Binutils 2.34 thru 2.38, allows attackers to cause a denial of service due to memory leaks.
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 |
| Binutils |
Gnu |
2.34 (including) |
2.38 (including) |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
bionic |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
esm-infra/bionic |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
esm-infra/xenial |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
focal |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
jammy |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
trusty |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
trusty/esm |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
upstream |
* |
| Binutils |
Ubuntu |
xenial |
* |
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