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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-13723

High
7.8/10

Summary

In X.Org Server (aka xserver and xorg-server) before 1.19.4, a local attacker authenticated to the X server could overflow a global buffer, causing crashes of the X server or potentially other problems by injecting large or malformed XKB related atoms and accessing them via xkbcomp.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • 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