Memory Leak in NI grpc-device Leading to DoS

Compliance Impact

This vulnerability primarily impacts system availability due to a memory leak that can lead to denial of service. There are no direct effects on confidentiality or integrity of data.

Since the vulnerability does not affect confidentiality or integrity, it does not directly compromise compliance with standards like GDPR or HIPAA, which focus heavily on protecting personal data privacy and integrity.

However, denial of service could indirectly affect availability requirements in some regulations, but no specific compliance impact is detailed in the provided information.

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Executive Summary

CVE-2026-48141 is a memory leak vulnerability in the NI grpc-device library's BeginSidebandStream function. This means that the software does not properly release memory after it is used, causing memory to be consumed continuously.

This issue affects versions up to and including 2.17.0 and has been fixed in version 2.18.0.

Because memory is not freed, the system can eventually run out of memory, potentially leading to a denial of service where the affected application or system becomes unavailable.

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Impact Analysis

The primary impact of this vulnerability is on system availability. Due to the memory leak, the system or application using the NI grpc-device library may exhaust its memory resources.

This can cause the affected service to crash or become unresponsive, resulting in a denial of service.

There are no direct impacts on confidentiality or integrity.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability is a memory leak in the NI grpc-device library's BeginSidebandStream function, which may lead to denial of service due to memory exhaustion.

Detection would involve monitoring the memory usage of processes using the NI grpc-device library, especially those running version 2.17.0 or earlier.

Suggested commands include using system monitoring tools to observe memory consumption over time for the grpc-device process, such as:

• On Linux: `top`, `htop`, or `ps aux --sort=-rss | grep grpc-device` to check memory usage.
• Using `valgrind --leak-check=full` or similar memory profiling tools on the grpc-device process to detect memory leaks.
• Network monitoring tools to detect unusual denial of service symptoms caused by memory exhaustion in grpc-device services.

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Mitigation Strategies

The primary mitigation step is to upgrade the NI grpc-device library to version 2.18.0 or later, where this memory leak vulnerability has been patched.

Since the vulnerability requires network access and has high complexity, limiting network exposure to the grpc-device service can also reduce risk.

Monitoring system memory usage and restarting the grpc-device service if memory consumption grows abnormally can be a temporary workaround until the upgrade is applied.

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