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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2008-5239

Medium
4.3/10

Summary

xine-lib 1.1.12, and other 1.1.15 and earlier versions, does not properly handle (a) negative and (b) zero values during unspecified read function calls in input_file.c, input_net.c, input_smb.c, and input_http.c, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via vectors such as (1) a file or (2) an HTTP response, which triggers consequences such as out-of-bounds reads and heap-based buffer overflows.

  • MEDIUM
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • 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