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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2012-4204

Severity High
Score 9.3/10

Summary

The str_unescape function in the JavaScript engine in Mozilla Firefox before 17.0, Thunderbird before 17.0, and SeaMonkey before 2.14 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (memory corruption and application crash) via unspecified vectors.

  • MEDIUM
  • 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