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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2008-1685

Medium
6.8/10

Summary

gcc 4.2.0 through 4.3.0 in GNU Compiler Collection, when casts are not used, considers the sum of a pointer and an int to be greater than or equal to the pointer, which might lead to removal of length testing code that was intended as a protection mechanism against integer overflow and buffer overflow attacks, and provide no diagnostic message about this removal. NOTE: the vendor has determined that this compiler behavior is correct according to section 6.5.6 of the C99 standard (aka ISO/IEC 9899:1999)

  • MEDIUM
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • PARTIAL
  • PARTIAL
  • PARTIAL

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