CVE-2026-102724 in NetX Duo
Summary
by MITRE • 09/29/2026
NULL Pointer Dereference When Evicting the Sole MSRP Attribute
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/29/2026
The vulnerability identified as NULL pointer dereference during the eviction of the sole Message Routing Protocol attribute represents a critical flaw in memory management logic within network infrastructure software, particularly affecting systems that implement multipath routing or complex packet forwarding mechanisms. This specific defect occurs when the system attempts to remove or evict an attribute associated with MSRP from its internal data structures under conditions where this attribute is the only remaining instance of such metadata for a given route or session context. In standard operational scenarios, software typically maintains references and pointers to various attributes that dictate how packets are routed, prioritized, or processed across different network interfaces. When these attributes are dynamically updated due to changes in network topology, policy enforcement, or load balancing adjustments, the underlying code must carefully manage memory allocation and deallocation to prevent corruption of the heap or stack structures.
The technical root cause lies in improper validation checks prior to freeing memory associated with the attribute structure. Specifically, when the last MSRP attribute is removed from a list or hash table used for routing decisions, the application fails to verify whether other components still hold references to this object before attempting to deallocate it. Consequently, subsequent operations that attempt to access fields within the now-freed memory block result in a null pointer dereference because the system attempts to read from an address that has been released back to the operating system but not yet overwritten or properly invalidated. This leads directly to application crashes, segmentation faults, or unexpected termination of critical network services responsible for maintaining connectivity and routing integrity across the affected infrastructure components.
From an operational impact perspective, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to service availability and stability. Since MSRP is often integral to high-availability clustering and redundant path selection in enterprise networks, triggering this condition can cause immediate disruption to active sessions or prevent new connections from being established. An attacker who can influence the rate of attribute changes—such as by rapidly changing routing advertisements, manipulating BGP updates, or sending crafted packets that trigger specific state transitions—could exploit this flaw to induce a denial-of-service condition. The impact extends beyond simple downtime; in some architectures, repeated crashes may lead to instability in neighboring devices if they rely on consistent keepalive messages from the affected system, potentially causing cascading failures across the network fabric.
This vulnerability aligns with CWE-476, which defines NULL Pointer Dereference as a design error where software performs an operation using a pointer that is expected to be valid but is actually null. In the context of modern attack frameworks, this flaw can be leveraged within ATT&CK technique T1498, Network Denial of Service, specifically under sub-techniques involving resource exhaustion or application layer attacks. By systematically triggering the eviction logic through controlled network events, an adversary can exhaust system resources not just by volume but by inducing logical errors that crash processes. This is particularly dangerous in automated environments where self-healing mechanisms might restart services repeatedly without addressing the underlying code defect, leading to sustained unavailability during remediation efforts.
Mitigation strategies must focus on both immediate patching and long-term architectural improvements. The primary remedy involves applying vendor-supplied patches that correct the memory management logic by adding explicit null checks before dereferencing pointers associated with evicted attributes. Developers should ensure that reference counting mechanisms are robust, ensuring that objects are only freed when no active references remain across all subsystems interacting with MSRP data structures. Additionally, implementing input validation to limit the rate of attribute changes can reduce the likelihood of triggering this race condition in production environments until patches are deployed. Security teams should monitor logs for segmentation faults or core dumps related to routing daemons and consider deploying network access control lists that restrict unauthorized sources from sending rapid configuration updates if such functionality is exposed externally without proper authentication and throttling mechanisms.