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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2015-3214

Medium
6.9/10

Summary

The pit_ioport_read in i8254.c in the Linux kernel before 2.6.33 and QEMU before 2.3.1 does not distinguish between read lengths and write lengths, which might allow guest OS users to execute arbitrary code on the host OS by triggering use of an invalid index.

  • MEDIUM
  • LOCAL
  • 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