Critical Vulnerabilities Patched by Asterisk for the PJSIP Architecture

The security research firm JFrog recently produced a technical analysis that identified five (5) vulnerabilities in the Asterisk framework library PJSIP for videoconferencing, with three (3) of them being deemed critical. Asterisk is an enterprise level open-source framework used for building communications applications. PJSIP is utilized as an open-source multimedia communication library used in communication protocols such as SIP, and STUN. Within the PJSIP framework is an API for SIP applications known as PJSUA, and the PJSUA Media Manipulation API is where the five (5) vulnerabilities were identified. For context, Asterisk states on their website that their framework gets downloaded two million times a year, and currently persists on one million servers located in 170 countries. The vulnerabilities are described as memory-corruption flaws, with the three critical ones specifically being stack overflow vulnerabilities, which could allow attackers to perform remote code execution (RCE) if exploited. The other two vulnerabilities are harder to exploit, but if the attackers were successful, it could allow them to perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which could crash the application. These flaws may impact applications like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and others, as well as products like Skype and Google Hangouts. All five (5) flaws have been patched by Asterisk, and they urge any administrators, developers, and users to immediately upgrade to version 2.12.