CVE-2024-20508: cisco cisco utd snort ips engine software Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2024-20508 is a medium (CVSS 6.5) Heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability in cisco cisco utd snort ips engine software. EPSS estimates a 0.42% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 34.5% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 25-09-2024
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 12-11-2024
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

A vulnerability in Cisco Unified Threat Defense (UTD) Snort Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) Engine for Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass configured security policies or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of HTTP requests when they are processed by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a reload of the Snort process. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to the default, fail-open, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow the attacker to bypass configured security policies. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to fail-close, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could cause traffic that is configured to be inspected by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine to be dropped.

• CWE-122Heap-based Buffer OverflowA heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().
• CWE-787Out-of-bounds WriteThe product writes data past the end, or before the beginning, of the intended buffer.