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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-16386

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 vulnerability occurs as a result of a computation that reads data that is past the end of the target buffer; the computation is part of the XPS2PDF conversion engine. The use of an invalid (out-of-range) pointer offset during access of internal data structure fields causes the vulnerability. A successful attack can lead to 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