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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-15670

High
9.8/10

Summary

The GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) before 2.27 contains an off-by-one error leading to a heap-based buffer overflow in the glob function in glob.c, related to the processing of home directories using the ~ operator followed by a long string.

  • 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