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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2012-1517

High
9/10

Summary

The VMX process in VMware ESXi 4.1 and ESX 4.1 does not properly handle RPC commands, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (memory overwrite and process crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code on the host OS via vectors involving function pointers.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • SINGLE
  • 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