CVE-2023-20251

A vulnerability in the memory buffer of Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) AireOS Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause memory leaks that could eventually lead to a device reboot. This vulnerability is due to memory leaks caused by multiple clients connecting under specific conditions. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by causing multiple wireless clients to attempt to connect to an access point (AP) on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reboot after a significant amount of time, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.

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://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-cbw-dos-YSmbUqX3
• https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-cbw-dos-YSmbUqX3