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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2012-3966

High
10/10

Summary

Mozilla Firefox before 15.0, Firefox ESR 10.x before 10.0.7, Thunderbird before 15.0, Thunderbird ESR 10.x before 10.0.7, and SeaMonkey before 2.12 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (memory corruption) via a negative height value in a BMP image within a .ICO file, related to (1) improper handling of the transparency bitmask by the nsICODecoder component and (2) improper processing of the alpha channel by the nsBMPDecoder component.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • 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