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Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')

CVE-2006-1540

Severity High
Score 9.3/10

Summary

MSO.DLL in Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP (2002), and Office 2003 allows user-assisted attackers to cause a denial of service and execute arbitrary code via multiple attack vectors, as originally demonstrated using a crafted document record with a malformed string, as demonstrated by replacing a certain "01 00 00 00" byte sequence with an "FF FF FF FF" byte sequence, possibly causing an invalid array index, in (1) an Excel .xls document, which triggers an access violation in ole32.dll; (2) an Excel .xlw document, which triggers an access violation in excel.exe; (3) a Word document, which triggers an access violation in mso.dll in winword.exe; and (4) a PowerPoint document, which triggers an access violation in powerpnt.txt. NOTE: after the initial disclosure, this issue was demonstrated by triggering an integer overflow using an inconsistent size for a Unicode "Sheet Name" string.

  • MEDIUM
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • COMPLETE
  • COMPLETE
  • COMPLETE

CWE-94 - Code Injection

Code injection is a type of vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code. This vulnerability fully compromises the machine and can cause a wide variety of security issues, such as unauthorized access to sensitive information, manipulation of data, denial of service attacks etc. Code injection is different from command injection in the fact that it is limited by the functionality of the injected language (e.g. PHP), as opposed to command injection, which leverages existing code to execute commands, usually within the context of a shell.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published