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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2016-6830

High
9.8/10

Summary

The "process-execute" and "process-spawn" procedures in CHICKEN Scheme used fixed-size buffers for holding the arguments and environment variables to use in its execve() call. This would allow user-supplied argument/environment variable lists to trigger a buffer overrun. This affects all releases of CHICKEN up to and including 4.11 (it will be fixed in 4.12 and 5.0, which are not yet released).

  • LOW
  • 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