Cybersecurity scientists on Tuesday disclosed details about a zero-click security vulnerability in Linphone Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) stack that could be remotely exploited with out any motion from a target to crash the SIP client and induce a denial-of-provider (DoS) problem.
Tracked as CVE-2021-33056 (CVSS score: 7.5), the issue considerations a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability in the “belle-sip” element, a C-language library utilised to implement SIP transportation, transaction, and dialog levels, with all variations prior to 4.5.20 influenced by the flaw. The weak spot was found out and documented by industrial cybersecurity company Claroty.
Linphone is an open up-resource and cross-system SIP customer with guidance for voice and movie calls, close-to-conclude encrypted messaging, and audio convention calls, amongst other people. SIP, on the other hand, is a signaling protocol utilized for initiating, maintaining, and terminating authentic-time multimedia conversation periods for voice, online video, and messaging applications around the net.
To that end, the remotely exploitable vulnerability can be activated by incorporating a malicious ahead slash (“
“The underlying bug here is that non-SIP URIs are accepted as valid SIP header values,” Claroty researcher Sharon Brizinov said in a write-up. “Therefore, a generic URI such as a simple single forward slash will be considered a SIP URI. This means that the given URI will not contain a valid SIP scheme (scheme will be NULL), and so when the [string] compare function is called with the non-existent scheme (NULL), a null pointer dereference will be triggered and crash the SIP client.”
It’s worth noting that the flaw is also a zero-click vulnerability as it’s possible to cause the SIP client to crash simply by sending an INVITE SIP request with a specially-crafted From/To/Diversion header. As a consequence, any application that uses belle-sip to analyze SIP messages will be rendered unavailable upon receiving a malicious SIP “call.”
Although the patches are available for the core protocol stack, it’s essential that the updates are applied downstream by vendors that rely on the affected SIP stack in their products.
“Successful exploits targeting IoT vulnerabilities have demonstrated they can provide an effective foothold onto enterprise networks,” Brizinov said. “A flaw in a foundational protocol such as the SIP stack in VoIP phones and applications can be especially troublesome given the scale and reach shown by attacks against numerous other third-party components used by developers in software projects.”
