Missing release of memory after effective lifetime in Windows Cryptographic Services allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network.
Weakness
The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Windows_11_22h2 |
Microsoft |
* |
10.0.22621.5472 (excluding) |
| Windows_11_23h2 |
Microsoft |
* |
10.0.22631.5472 (excluding) |
| Windows_11_24h2 |
Microsoft |
* |
10.0.26100.4270 (excluding) |
| Windows_server_2022 |
Microsoft |
* |
10.0.20348.3745 (excluding) |
| Windows_server_2022_23h2 |
Microsoft |
* |
10.0.25398.1665 (excluding) |
| Windows_server_2025 |
Microsoft |
* |
10.0.26100.4270 (excluding) |
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