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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2016-4296

Severity High
Score 7.8/10

Summary

When opening a Hangul Hcell Document (.cell) and processing a record that uses the CSSValFormat object, Hancom Office 2014 will search for an underscore ("_") character at the end of the string and write a null terminator after it. If the character is at the very end of the string, the application will mistakenly write the null-byte outside the bounds of its destination. This can result in heap corruption that can lead 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