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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-16371

High
8.8/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in Adobe Acrobat and Reader: 2017.012.20098 and earlier versions, 2017.011.30066 and earlier versions, 2015.006.30355 and earlier versions, and 11.0.22 and earlier versions. This issue is due to an untrusted pointer dereference in the JavaScript engine. In this scenario, the input is crafted in a way that the computation results in pointers to memory locations that do not belong to the relevant process address space. The dereferencing operation is a read operation, and an attack can result in sensitive data exposure.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • 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