A vulnerability in the OSPF protocol of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an authenticated, adjacent attacker to exhaust memory on an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improperly validating input by the OSPF protocol when parsing packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by by sending crafted OSPF packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust memory on the affected device, resulting in a DoS condition.
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.