CVE-2016-9938

Description

An issue was discovered in Asterisk Open Source 11.x before 11.25.1, 13.x before 13.13.1, and 14.x before 14.2.1 and Certified Asterisk 11.x before 11.6-cert16 and 13.x before 13.8-cert4. The chan_sip channel driver has a liberal definition for whitespace when attempting to strip the content between a SIP header name and a colon character. Rather than following RFC 3261 and stripping only spaces and horizontal tabs, Asterisk treats any non-printable ASCII character as if it were whitespace. This means that headers such as Contact\x01: will be seen as a valid Contact header. This mostly does not pose a problem until Asterisk is placed in tandem with an authenticating SIP proxy. In such a case, a crafty combination of valid and invalid To headers can cause a proxy to allow an INVITE request into Asterisk without authentication since it believes the request is an in-dialog request. However, because of the bug described above, the request will look like an out-of-dialog request to Asterisk. Asterisk will then process the request as a new call. The result is that Asterisk can process calls from unvetted sources without any authentication. If you do not use a proxy for authentication, then this issue does not affect you. If your proxy is dialog-aware (meaning that the proxy keeps track of what dialogs are currently valid), then this issue does not affect you. If you use chan_pjsip instead of chan_sip, then this issue does not affect you.

Category

5.3
CVSS
Severity: Medium
CVSS 3.0 •
CVSS 2.0 •
EPSS 1.42% Top 25%
Vendor Advisory asterisk.org
Affected: n/a n/a
Published at:
Updated at:

References

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the severity of CVE-2016-9938?
CVE-2016-9938 has been scored as a medium severity vulnerability.
How to fix CVE-2016-9938?
To fix CVE-2016-9938, make sure you are using an up-to-date version of the affected component(s) by checking the vendor release notes. As for now, there are no other specific guidelines available.
Is CVE-2016-9938 being actively exploited in the wild?
It is possible that CVE-2016-9938 is being exploited or will be exploited in a near future based on public information. According to its EPSS score, there is a ~1% probability that this vulnerability will be exploited by malicious actors in the next 30 days.
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