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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2015-8723

Severity Medium
Score 5.5/10

Summary

The AirPDcapPacketProcess function in epan/crypt/airpdcap.c in the 802.11 dissector in Wireshark 1.12.x before 1.12.9 and 2.0.x before 2.0.1 does not validate the relationship between the total length and the capture length, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (stack-based buffer overflow and application crash) via a crafted packet.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

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