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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2016-2377

High
8.1/10

Summary

A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the handling of the MXIT protocol in Pidgin. Specially crafted MXIT data sent by the server could potentially result in an out-of-bounds write of one byte. A malicious server can send a negative content-length in response to a HTTP request triggering the vulnerability.

  • 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