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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2015-8388

High
7.5/10

Summary

PCRE before 8.38 mishandles the /(?=di(?<=(?1))|(?=(.))))/ pattern and related patterns with an unmatched closing parenthesis, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (buffer overflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror.

  • 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.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published