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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-16395

Severity High
Score 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. The vulnerability is caused by a buffer access with an incorrect length value in the image conversion module when processing Enhanced Metafile Format (EMF). Crafted EMF input (EMR_STRETCHDIBITS) causes a mismatch between allocated buffer size and the access allowed by the computation. If an attacker can adequately control the accessible memory then this vulnerability can be leveraged to achieve arbitrary code execution.

  • 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