CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2019-17210 — A denial-of-service issue was discovered in the MQTT library in Arm Mbed OS 2017-11-02
A denial-of-service issue was discovered in the MQTT library in Arm Mbed OS 2017-11-02. The function readMQTTLenString() is called by the function MQTTDeserialize_publish() to get the length and content of the MQTT topic name. In the function readMQTTLenString(), mqttstring->lenstring.len is a part of user input, which can be manipulated. An attacker can simply change it to a larger value to invalidate the if statement so that the statements inside the if statement are skipped, letting the value of mqttstring->lenstring.data default to zero. Later, curn is accessed, which points to mqttstring->lenstring.data. On an Arm Cortex-M chip, the value at address 0x0 is actually the initialization value for the MSP register. It is highly dependent on the actual firmware. Therefore, the behavior of the program is unpredictable from this time on.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2019-11-04
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20
Affected products
- arm / mbed-mqtt / 2017-11-02
- arm / mbed-os
Matched remediation archetype
General vulnerability remediation
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Confirm the affected component, deployment paths, reachable interfaces, and enabled features from inventories and configuration, without probing production destructively.
- Compare the advisory's affected conditions with the repository lockfiles, build manifests, artifacts, and runtime inventory.
- Identify data sensitivity, trust boundaries, and privilege level for every confirmed affected deployment.
Remediate safely
- Apply a vendor-supported fix or remove the affected component or feature; record the selected change and its source in the repository.
- Update direct and transitive dependency locks, generated artifacts, deployment manifests, and asset inventories together.
- Add a regression test for the documented unsafe condition using inert inputs and preserve rollback instructions.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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