CVE-2016-9938 json
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.…
published 2016-12-12 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-10725
- cvss
- 5.3
- version 3.0, NVD
- cisa kev
- Not listed
- not in CISA's catalog
- epss
- 3.4%
- EPSS 3.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 89%
- public exploits
- 0
- none known
Summary
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.
Patch / fix
- asterisk Debian 14 1:13.13.1~dfsg-1
debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-9938
Vendor advisories
What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.
red hat product security vex CVE-2016-9938 updated cvss 3.7
asterisk: Authentication Bypass due to improper content stripping
-
Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat productsnot affected: vulnerable code not present
Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf
Exploit prediction
3.43% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 89% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).
CVSS scores
| assigned by | version | score | vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVD | 3.0 | 5.3 | CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N |
| NVD | 2.0 | 5.0 | AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N |
Classification
- Weakness
-
- CWE-285 Improper Authorization
References
-
downloads.asterisk.org
/pub/security/AST-2016-009.html
mitigation, vendor-advisory
-
securityfocus.com
/bid/94789
vdb-entry, third-party-advisory
-
securitytracker.com
/id/1037408
vdb-entry
Sources
- CVE List CVE-2016-9938
- NVD CVE-2016-9938
Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.