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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2008-1673

High
10/10

Summary

The asn1 implementation in (a) the Linux kernel 2.4 before 2.4.36.6 and 2.6 before 2.6.25.5, as used in the cifs and ip_nat_snmp_basic modules; and (b) the gxsnmp package; does not properly validate length values during decoding of ASN.1 BER data, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or execute arbitrary code via (1) a length greater than the working buffer, which can lead to an unspecified overflow; (2) an oid length of zero, which can lead to an off-by-one error; or (3) an indefinite length for a primitive encoding.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • COMPLETE
  • COMPLETE
  • COMPLETE

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