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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2016-2376

High
8.1/10

Summary

A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the handling of the MXIT protocol in Pidgin. Specially crafted MXIT data sent from the server could potentially result in arbitrary code execution. A malicious server or an attacker who intercepts the network traffic can send an invalid size for a packet which will trigger a buffer overflow.

  • HIGH
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • 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