Multiple Cisco products are affected by a vulnerability in the Snort 3 Detection Engine that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the Snort 3 Detection Engine to restart, resulting in an interruption of packet inspection.
This vulnerability is due to an error in the binder module initialization logic of the Snort Detection Engine. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending certain packets through an established connection that is parsed by Snort 3. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a DoS condition when the Snort 3 Detection Engine restarts unexpectedly.
Weakness
The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.
Extended Description
Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.
Potential Mitigations
Related Attack Patterns
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/25.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/27.html