Virtual attribute handling in Ping Identity PingDirectory in affected versions allows only authorized users to exhaust java memory heap when recent login history is enabled and copying virtual attributes that reference ds-privilege-name values.
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.
References
- https://docs.pingidentity.com/pingdirectory/11.0/release_notes/pd_release_notes.html#pingdirectory-suite-of-products-11-0-0-1-march-2026
- https://support.pingidentity.com/s/article/SECADV052-Denial-of-Service-via-copying-virtual-attributes
- https://www.pingidentity.com/en/resources/downloads/pingdirectory-downloads.html