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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2016-4294

High
7.8/10

Summary

When opening a Hangul Hcell Document (.cell) and processing a property record within the Workbook stream, Hancom Office 2014 will attempt to allocate space for an element using a length from the file. When copying user-supplied data to this buffer, however, the application will use a different size which leads to a heap-based buffer overflow. This vulnerability can lead to code-execution under the context of the application.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • 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