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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2014-8176

Severity High
Score 7.5/10

Summary

The dtls1_clear_queues function in ssl/d1_lib.c in OpenSSL before 0.9.8za, 1.0.0 before 1.0.0m, and 1.0.1 before 1.0.1h frees data structures without considering that application data can arrive between a ChangeCipherSpec message and a Finished message, which allows remote DTLS peers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via unexpected application data.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • PARTIAL
  • PARTIAL
  • 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.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published