{"cve":"CVE-2016-9938","nvd":{"published":"2016-12-12T21:59:01.617","modified":"2026-06-17T00:56:48.680","status":"Modified","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.","cvss_v4":null,"cvss_v3":{"version":"3.0","vector":"CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N","score":5.3},"cwes":["CWE-285"],"references":["http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/security/AST-2016-009.html","http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94789","http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1037408","http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/security/AST-2016-009.html","http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94789"],"products":["digium:asterisk","digium:certified_asterisk"],"source":"nvd","synced_at":"2026-10-19T20:41:25.729257544+00:00"},"epss":{"cve":"CVE-2016-9938","score":0.03429,"percentile":0.88933,"date":"2026-10-31"},"kev":null,"osv":[],"attribution":["This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.","EPSS scores: FIRST Exploit Prediction Scoring System, https://www.first.org/epss","Known exploited vulnerabilities: CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog","Package advisories: OSV (https://osv.dev), from the GitHub Advisory Database, PyPA, Go, RustSec and other ecosystem databases, under CC-BY 4.0 or CC0","CVE records: the CVE Program's CVE List (https://www.cve.org), under its terms of use (https://www.cve.org/Legal/TermsOfUse). CVE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation; this product is not affiliated with the CVE Program."]}