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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2025-56353

High
7.5/10

Summary

In tinyMQTT commit 6226ade15bd4f97be2d196352e64dd10937c1962 (2024-02-18), a memory leak occurs due to the broker's failure to validate or reject malformed UTF-8 strings in topic filters. An attacker can exploit this by sending repeated subscription requests with arbitrarily large or invalid filter payloads. Each request causes memory to be allocated for the malformed topic filter, but the broker does not free the associated memory, leading to unbounded heap growth and potential denial of service under sustained attack.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-401 - Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)

'Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)' is a weakness that occurs when software doesn't effectively release allocated memory after it is used. If not addressed, this enables attackers to launch denial of service attacks (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected behavior resulting from low memory conditions.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published