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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2009-2479

High
7.8/10

Summary

Mozilla Firefox 3.0.x, 3.5, and 3.5.1 on Windows allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (uncaught exception and application crash) via a long Unicode string argument to the write method. NOTE: this was originally reported as a stack-based buffer overflow. NOTE: on Linux and Mac OS X, a crash resulting from this long string reportedly occurs in an operating-system library, not in Firefox.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • 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