What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2020-12887
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 1.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2020-06-18 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-190
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.
Affected products
- Arm Mbed-Coap: 5.1.5
References
- https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-coap/pull/116
- https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/12930
- https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/12957
- https://github.com/mjurczak/mbed-coap/commit/4647a68e364401e81dbd370728127d844f221d93
- https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-coap/pull/116
- https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/12930
- https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/issues/12957
- https://github.com/mjurczak/mbed-coap/commit/4647a68e364401e81dbd370728127d844f221d93
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