CVE-2021-31807

Description

An incorrect memory management flaw was found in Squid, where it is vulnerable to a denial of service attack against all clients using the proxy. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Statement

This issue has been rated as having a security impact of Moderate. At this stage in their life, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 only accept Important and Critical Security Advisories (RHSAs) and this flaw does not meet these criteria. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata.

Red Hat Satellite does not ship the Squid package, however, does consume it from RHEL 7 repository. Product is not affected by this flaw as squid.conf configuration disables all the http_access fragments except the localhost.

Mitigation

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score6.56.5N/A
Attack VectorNetworkNetworkN/A
Attack ComplexityLowLowN/A
Privileges RequiredLowLowN/A
User InteractionNoneNoneN/A
ScopeUnchangedUnchangedN/A
ConfidentialityNoneNoneN/A
Integrity ImpactNoneNoneN/A
Availability ImpactHighHighN/A

Vector

Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Availability

Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory); DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)

If an attacker can trigger the allocation of the limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the most common result is denial of service. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment, i.e., the product may slow down, crash due to unhandled errors, or lock out legitimate users. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as well as its host operating system.

Access Control,Other

Technical Impact: Bypass Protection Mechanism; Other

In some cases it may be possible to force the product to "fail open" in the event of resource exhaustion. The state of the product -- and possibly the security functionality - may then be compromised.

Acknowledgements

Upstream acknowledges Joshua Rogers (Opera Software) as the original reporter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Want to get errata notifications? Sign up here.