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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2008-5187

High
7.5/10

Summary

The load function in the XPM loader for imlib2 1.4.2, and possibly other versions, allows attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted XPM file that triggers a "pointer arithmetic error" and a heap-based buffer overflow, a different vulnerability than CVE-2008-2426.

  • LOW
  • 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