An unauthenticated denial of service vulnerability exists in the OMEC UPF component, which could allow remote attackers to crash the service and disrupt critical user plane traffic.

This is a denial of service vulnerability caused by a nil pointer dereference. The flaw occurs when the PFCP association handler fails to validate the mandatory Recovery Time Stamp Information Element, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to trigger a process panic by sending a crafted PFCP Association Setup Request to the N4/PFCP endpoint.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability results in the immediate termination of the UPF process, leading to a disruption of user plane services. Given the CVSS score of 7.5, this high severity flaw poses a significant risk to network availability, potentially causing widespread service outages for downstream users or subscribers.

Immediate Action: Review the provided vendor references and pull request 964 to identify the necessary code changes, and verify if an official patch version has been released by the project maintainers.

Proactive Monitoring: Monitor the N4/PFCP interface for anomalous volumes of PFCP Association Setup Requests, and alert on repeated process crashes or service restarts within the UPF environment.

Compensating Controls: Implement network-level access control lists to restrict traffic to the N4/PFCP endpoint, ensuring that only authorized control plane entities can communicate with the UPF.

Public Exploit Available: No (exploit_available: unknown)

This vulnerability represents a significant threat to network stability and must be addressed with high priority. Organizations utilizing the affected version of the OMEC UPF should apply the identified fix or pull request immediately to prevent potential service disruption, while simultaneously enforcing strict network segmentation to limit exposure of the N4/PFCP interface.