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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2011-3594

Severity Medium
Score 4.3/10

Summary

The g_markup_escape_text function in the SILC protocol plug-in in libpurple 2.10.0 and earlier, as used in Pidgin and possibly other products, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via invalid UTF-8 sequences that trigger use of invalid pointers and an out-of-bounds read, related to interactions with certain versions of glib2.

  • 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