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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2013-3245

Medium
6.3/10

Summary

plugins/demux/libmkv_plugin.dll in VideoLAN VLC Media Player 2.0.7, and possibly other versions, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted MKV file, possibly involving an integer overflow and out-of-bounds read or heap-based buffer overflow, or an uncaught exception. NOTE: the vendor disputes the severity and claimed vulnerability type of this issue, stating "This PoC crashes VLC, indeed, but does nothing more... this is not an integer overflow error, but an uncaught exception and I doubt that it is exploitable. This uncaught exception makes VLC abort, not execute random code, on my Linux 64bits machine." A PoC posted by the original researcher shows signs of an attacker-controlled out-of-bounds read, but the affected instruction does not involve a register that directly influences control flow

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • LOW
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • LOW

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