CVE-2020-12887

HIGH

Arm Mbed OS 5.15.3 - Memory Corruption

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

Memory leaks were discovered in the CoAP library in Arm Mbed OS 5.15.3 when using the Arm mbed-coap library 5.1.5. The CoAP parser is responsible for parsing received CoAP packets. The function sn_coap_parser_options_parse() parses the CoAP option number field of all options present in the input packet. Each option number is calculated as a sum of the previous option number and a delta of the current option. The delta and the previous option number are expressed as unsigned 16-bit integers. Due to lack of overflow detection, it is possible to craft a packet that wraps the option number around and results in the same option number being processed again in a single packet. Certain options allocate memory by calling a memory allocation function. In the cases of COAP_OPTION_URI_QUERY, COAP_OPTION_URI_PATH, COAP_OPTION_LOCATION_QUERY, and COAP_OPTION_ETAG, there is no check on whether memory has already been allocated, which in conjunction with the option number integer overflow may lead to multiple assignments of allocated memory to a single pointer. This has been demonstrated to lead to memory leak by buffer orphaning. As a result, the memory is never freed.

References (4)

Core 4
Core References
Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/12957
Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/12930
Third Party Advisory x_refsource_confirm
https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-coap/pull/116

Scores

CVSS v3 7.5
EPSS 0.0073
EPSS Percentile 72.8%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-190 CWE-401
Status published
Products (1)
arm/mbed-coap 5.1.5
Published Jun 18, 2020
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026