A vulnerability in the IKEv2 feature of Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Software and Cisco Secure FTD Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a DoS condition on an affected device that may impact the availability of services to devices elsewhere in the network. This vulnerability is due to a memory leak when parsing IKEv2 packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted IKEv2 packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources, causing a DoS condition that will eventually require the device to be manually reloaded.
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.