CVE-2021-25217 - Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

Severity

74%

Complexity

27%

Confidentiality

66%

In ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV-R1 -> 4.1-ESV-R16, ISC DHCP 4.4.0 -> 4.4.2 (Other branches of ISC DHCP (i.e., releases in the 4.0.x series or lower and releases in the 4.3.x series) are beyond their End-of-Life (EOL) and no longer supported by ISC. From inspection it is clear that the defect is also present in releases from those series, but they have not been officially tested for the vulnerability), The outcome of encountering the defect while reading a lease that will trigger it varies, according to: the component being affected (i.e., dhclient or dhcpd) whether the package was built as a 32-bit or 64-bit binary whether the compiler flag -fstack-protection-strong was used when compiling In dhclient, ISC has not successfully reproduced the error on a 64-bit system. However, on a 32-bit system it is possible to cause dhclient to crash when reading an improper lease, which could cause network connectivity problems for an affected system due to the absence of a running DHCP client process. In dhcpd, when run in DHCPv4 or DHCPv6 mode: if the dhcpd server binary was built for a 32-bit architecture AND the -fstack-protection-strong flag was specified to the compiler, dhcpd may exit while parsing a lease file containing an objectionable lease, resulting in lack of service to clients. Additionally, the offending lease and the lease immediately following it in the lease database may be improperly deleted. if the dhcpd server binary was built for a 64-bit architecture OR if the -fstack-protection-strong compiler flag was NOT specified, the crash will not occur, but it is possible for the offending lease and the lease which immediately followed it to be improperly deleted.

CVSS 3.1 Base Score 7.4. CVSS Attack Vector: adjacent_network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H).

CVSS 2.0 Base Score 3.3. CVSS Attack Vector: adjacent_network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (AV:A/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P).

Demo Examples

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CWE-119

This example takes an IP address from a user, verifies that it is well formed and then looks up the hostname and copies it into a buffer.


               
}
strcpy(hostname, hp->h_name);/*routine that ensures user_supplied_addr is in the right format for conversion */

This function allocates a buffer of 64 bytes to store the hostname, however there is no guarantee that the hostname will not be larger than 64 bytes. If an attacker specifies an address which resolves to a very large hostname, then we may overwrite sensitive data or even relinquish control flow to the attacker.

Note that this example also contains an unchecked return value (CWE-252) that can lead to a NULL pointer dereference (CWE-476).

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CWE-119

This example applies an encoding procedure to an input string and stores it into a buffer.


               
}
return dst_buf;
die("user string too long, die evil hacker!");
else dst_buf[dst_index++] = user_supplied_string[i];
dst_buf[dst_index++] = ';';
/* encode to < */

The programmer attempts to encode the ampersand character in the user-controlled string, however the length of the string is validated before the encoding procedure is applied. Furthermore, the programmer assumes encoding expansion will only expand a given character by a factor of 4, while the encoding of the ampersand expands by 5. As a result, when the encoding procedure expands the string it is possible to overflow the destination buffer if the attacker provides a string of many ampersands.

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CWE-119

The following example asks a user for an offset into an array to select an item.


               
}
printf("You selected %s\n", items[index-1]);

The programmer allows the user to specify which element in the list to select, however an attacker can provide an out-of-bounds offset, resulting in a buffer over-read (CWE-126).

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CWE-119

In the following code, the method retrieves a value from an array at a specific array index location that is given as an input parameter to the method


               
}
return value;// check that the array index is less than the maximum// length of the array
value = array[index];// get the value at the specified index of the array
// if array index is invalid then output error message// and return value indicating error
value = -1;

However, this method only verifies that the given array index is less than the maximum length of the array but does not check for the minimum value (CWE-839). This will allow a negative value to be accepted as the input array index, which will result in a out of bounds read (CWE-125) and may allow access to sensitive memory. The input array index should be checked to verify that is within the maximum and minimum range required for the array (CWE-129). In this example the if statement should be modified to include a minimum range check, as shown below.


               
...// check that the array index is within the correct// range of values for the array

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CWE-119

Windows provides the _mbs family of functions to perform various operations on multibyte strings. When these functions are passed a malformed multibyte string, such as a string containing a valid leading byte followed by a single null byte, they can read or write past the end of the string buffer causing a buffer overflow. The following functions all pose a risk of buffer overflow: _mbsinc _mbsdec _mbsncat _mbsncpy _mbsnextc _mbsnset _mbsrev _mbsset _mbsstr _mbstok _mbccpy _mbslen

Overview

First reported 3 years ago

2021-05-26 22:15:00

Last updated 3 years ago

2021-06-09 16:47:00

Affected Software

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release 10

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release 10 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R10 Release Candidate 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R10 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R10 Release Candidate 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R11

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release 11 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release 11 Release Candidate 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release11 Release Candidate 2

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R11 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R11 Release Candidate 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release 12

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV Release 12 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R12 P1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R13

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R13 B1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R14

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R14 B1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R15

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R11 Release Candidate 2

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R12 Patch 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R12 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R13 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R14 Beta 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R15 Patch 1

4.1-esv

ISC DHCP 4.1-ESV R15 B1

4.1-esv

Debian Linux 9.0

9.0

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