CVE-2024-20508

A vulnerability in Cisco Unified Threat Defense (UTD) Snort Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) Engine for Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass configured security policies or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device.

This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of HTTP requests when they are processed by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a reload of the Snort process. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to the default, fail-open, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow the attacker to bypass configured security policies. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to fail-close, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could cause traffic that is configured to be inspected by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine to be dropped.

Weakness

A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are offered by certain compilers or compiler extensions. Examples include: the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice, which provide various mechanisms including canary-based detection and range/index checking.
• D3-SFCV (Stack Frame Canary Validation) from D3FEND [REF-1334] discusses canary-based detection in detail.
• Run or compile the software using features or extensions that randomly arrange the positions of a program’s executable and libraries in memory. Because this makes the addresses unpredictable, it can prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to exploitable code.
• Examples include Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) [REF-58] [REF-60] and Position-Independent Executables (PIE) [REF-64]. Imported modules may be similarly realigned if their default memory addresses conflict with other modules, in a process known as “rebasing” (for Windows) and “prelinking” (for Linux) [REF-1332] using randomly generated addresses. ASLR for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink since it would require relocating the libraries at run-time, defeating the whole purpose of prelinking.
• For more information on these techniques see D3-SAOR (Segment Address Offset Randomization) from D3FEND [REF-1335].

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/92.html

References

• https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-utd-snort3-dos-bypas-b4OUEwxD