In tinyMQTT commit 6226ade15bd4f97be2d196352e64dd10937c1962 (2024-02-18), a memory leak occurs due to the brokers failure to validate or reject malformed UTF-8 strings in topic filters. An attacker can exploit this by sending repeated subscription requests with arbitrarily large or invalid filter payloads. Each request causes memory to be allocated for the malformed topic filter, but the broker does not free the associated memory, leading to unbounded heap growth and potential denial of service under sustained attack.
Weakness
The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.
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.