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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-1000101

Medium
6.5/10

Summary

curl supports "globbing" of URLs, in which a user can pass a numerical range to have the tool iterate over those numbers to do a sequence of transfers. In the globbing function that parses the numerical range, there was an omission that made curl read a byte beyond the end of the URL if given a carefully crafted, or just wrongly written, URL. The URL is stored in a heap based buffer, so it could then be made to wrongly read something else instead of crashing. An example of a URL that triggers the flaw would be `http://ur%20[0-60000000000000000000`.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • NONE
  • HIGH
  • NONE

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