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CWE-401

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CWE-401

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Variant
Draft

Description

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

Common Consequences

Scope

Availability

Impact

DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Instability, DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)

Scope

Other

Impact

Reduce Performance

Potential Mitigations

Implementation

Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone. For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers. When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391]. To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

Architecture and Design

Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.

Architecture and Design
Build and Compilation

Consider using the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector (bdwgc), which can help avoid leaks.

CVE-2005-3119

Memory leak because function does not free() an element of a data structure.

CVE-2004-0427

Memory leak when counter variable is not decremented.

CVE-2002-0574

chain: reference count is not decremented, leading to memory leak in OS by sending ICMP packets.

CVE-2005-3181

Kernel uses wrong function to release a data structure, preventing data from being properly tracked by other code.

CVE-2004-0222

Memory leak via unknown manipulations as part of protocol test suite.

CVE-2001-0136

Memory leak via a series of the same command.

Applicable Platforms

Not Language-Specific
C
C++

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