CVE-2023-40019: FreeSWITCH allows authorized users to cause a denial of service attack by sending re-INVITE with SDP containing duplicate codec names

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2023-09-15 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-770

Description

FreeSWITCH is a Software Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation from proprietary telecom switches to a software implementation that runs on any commodity hardware. Prior to version 1.10.10, FreeSWITCH allows authorized users to cause a denial of service attack by sending re-INVITE with SDP containing duplicate codec names. When a call in FreeSWITCH completes codec negotiation, the `codec_string` channel variable is set with the result of the negotiation. On a subsequent re-negotiation, if an SDP is offered that contains codecs with the same names but with different formats, there may be too many codec matches detected by FreeSWITCH leading to overflows of its internal arrays. By abusing this vulnerability, an attacker is able to corrupt stack of FreeSWITCH leading to an undefined behavior of the system or simply crash it. Version 1.10.10 contains a patch for this issue.

Affected products

signalwire freeswitch: before 1.10.10 — fixed in 1.10.10

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: signalwire freeswitch 1.10.10. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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