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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2011-1576

Medium
5.7/10

Summary

The Generic Receive Offload (GRO) implementation in the Linux kernel 2.6.18 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 2.6.32 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, as used in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) Hypervisor and other products, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via crafted VLAN packets that are processed by the napi_reuse_skb function, leading to (1) a memory leak or (2) memory corruption, a different vulnerability than CVE-2011-1478.

  • MEDIUM
  • ADJACENT_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