Skip to main content

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-17821

Severity High
Score 9.8/10

Summary

WTF/wtf/FastBitVector.h in WebKit, as distributed in Safari Technology Preview Release 46, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (buffer overflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact because it calls the FastBitVectorWordOwner::resizeSlow function (in WTF/wtf/FastBitVector.cpp) for a purpose other than initializing a bitvector size, and resizeSlow mishandles cases where the old array length is greater than the new array length.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-119 - Buffer Overflow

Buffer overflow attacks involve data transit and operations exceeding the restricted memory buffer, thereby corrupting or overwriting data in adjacent memory locations. Such overflow allows the attacker to run arbitrary code or manipulate the existing code to cause privilege escalation, data breach, denial of service, system crash and even complete system compromise. Given that languages such as C and C++ lack default safeguards against overwriting or accessing data in their memory, applications utilizing these languages are most susceptible to buffer overflows attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published