#VU33497 Resource exhaustion - CVE-2016-6831

Vulnerability identifier: #VU33497

Vulnerability risk: Medium

CVSSv4.0: 6.6 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/U:Green]

CVE-ID: CVE-2016-6831

CWE-ID: CWE-400

Exploitation vector: Network

Exploit availability: No

Description

The vulnerability allows a remote non-authenticated attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.

The "process-execute" and "process-spawn" procedures did not free memory correctly when the execve() call failed, resulting in a memory leak. This could be abused by an attacker to cause resource exhaustion or a denial of service. This affects all releases of CHICKEN up to and including 4.11 (it will be fixed in 4.12 and 5.0, which are not yet released).

Mitigation
Install update from vendor's website.

External links
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-announce/2016-08/msg00001.html
https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92550

---

Q & A

Can this vulnerability be exploited remotely?

Yes. This vulnerability can be exploited by a remote non-authenticated attacker via the Internet.

Is there known malware, which exploits this vulnerability?

No. We are not aware of malware exploiting this vulnerability.