MEDIUM SEVERITY

CVE-2016-9938

Asterisk vulnerability

CVSS
5.3
EPSS
3.4%
EPSS pct
88th
Exploited
No known
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.
Affected vendor
Digium
Affected product
Asterisk
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Weakness type (CWE)
Published
2016-12-12

Risk analysis

Based on its CVSS vector, this vulnerability is exploitable over the network, low attack complexity, requiring no privileges, no user interaction. Successful exploitation leads to low impact to integrity.

Its EPSS score of 3.4% reflects a lower probability of exploitation activity in the wild over the next 30 days, placing it above 88% of all scored CVEs.

Check your external exposure to CVE-2016-9938

  • Confirm whether Digium Asterisk is running on any internet-facing host or subdomain.
  • Match discovered service fingerprints against the version affected by CVE-2016-9938.
  • Prioritise remediation if the asset is public, business-critical, or near authentication/payment flows.

How ThreatPort helps with CVE-2016-9938

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