The NASA’s Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) is an implementation of Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). A BPv7 bundle with a malformed extension block causes uncontrolled memory allocation inside ION-DTN 4.1.3s, leading to receiver thread termination and a Denial-of-Service (DoS). The triggering bundle contains an extension block starting at 0x85070201005bbb0e20b4ea001a000927c0...
. The first byte in the extension block (0x85) indicates a CBOR array of five elements of which the first four are numbers (0x07, 0x02, 0x01, 0x00) but the fifth element is a byte string of length 27 (0x5bbb0e20b4ea001a000927c0...
). The vulnerability seems to be due to processing the fifth element of the array (i.e., the byte string) as replacing it with a number makes the vulnerability no longer be triggered. While parsing this extension block, ION obtains a very large block length, which in the code in bei.c
:764) seems to be passed from blockLength
which is an unsigned int, to a 32 bit signed integer blkSize
. The unsigned to signed conversion causes blkSize
to hold the value of -369092043, which is then converted into a 64-bit unsigned value inside MTAKE(blkSize)
, resulting in an attempt to allocate an unrealistic amount of memory, causing the error. As of time of publication, no known patched versions of BPv7 exist.