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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2012-1545

Medium
5.8/10

Summary

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 through 9, and 10 Consumer Preview, allows remote attackers to bypass Protected Mode or cause a denial of service (memory corruption) by leveraging access to a Low integrity process, as demonstrated by VUPEN during a Pwn2Own competition at CanSecWest 2012.

  • MEDIUM
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • PARTIAL
  • 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