CVE-2020-12883

Technical Description

Buffer over-reads were discovered in the CoAP library in Arm Mbed OS 5.15.3. The CoAP parser is responsible for parsing received CoAP packets. The function sn_coap_parser_options_parse() parses CoAP input linearly using a while loop. Once an option is parsed in a loop, the current point (*packet_data_pptr) is increased correspondingly. The pointer is restricted by the size of the received buffer, as well as by the option delta and option length bytes. The actual input packet length is not verified against the number of bytes read when processing the option extended delta and the option extended length. Moreover, the calculation of the message_left variable, in the case of non-extended option deltas, is incorrect and indicates more data left for processing than provided in the function input. All of these lead to heap-based or stack-based memory location read access that is outside of the intended boundary of the buffer. Depending on the platform-specific memory management mechanisms, i

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from arm. Update mbed_os to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References