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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2009-5047

High
9.8/10

Summary

Jetty suffers from an escape sequence injection vulnerability from an attack vector by means of: 1) "Cookie Dump Servlet" and 2) Http Content-Length header. 1) A POST request to the form at "/test/cookie/" with the "Age" parameter set to a string throws a "java.lang.NumberFormatException" which reflects binary characters including ESC. These characters could be used to execute arbitrary commands or buffer dumps in the terminal. 2) The attack vector in 1) can be exploited by requesting a page using an HTTP request "Content-Length" header set to a consonant string (string including only letters). The "Cookie Dump Servlet" feature doesn't have a patch.

  • 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