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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2015-8869

High
9.1/10

Summary

OCaml before 4.03.0 does not properly handle sign extensions, which allows remote attackers to conduct buffer overflow attacks or obtain sensitive information as demonstrated by a long string to the String.copy function.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH
  • 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