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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2009-0840

Severity High
Score 10/10

Summary

Heap-based buffer underflow in the readPostBody function in cgiutil.c in mapserv in MapServer 4.x before 4.10.4 and 5.x before 5.2.2 allows remote attackers to have an unknown impact via a negative value in the Content-Length HTTP header.

  • 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