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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2008-3465

High
9.8/10

Summary

Heap-based buffer overflow in an API in GDI in Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 and SP3, Server 2003 SP1 and SP2, Vista Gold and SP1, and Server 2008 allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code via a WMF file with a malformed file-size parameter, which would not be properly handled by a third-party application that uses this API for a copy operation, aka "GDI Heap Overflow Vulnerability."

  • 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