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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2006-1902

Low
2.1/10

Summary

fold_binary in fold-const.c in GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) 4.1 improperly handles pointer overflow when folding a certain expr comparison to a corresponding offset comparison in cases other than EQ_EXPR and NE_EXPR, which might introduce buffer overflow vulnerabilities into applications that could be exploited by context-dependent attackers.NOTE: the vendor states that the essence of the issue is "not correctly interpreting an offset to a pointer as a signed value."

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • PARTIAL
  • NONE
  • NONE

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