Skip to main content

Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-17121

High
7.8/10

Summary

The Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.29.1, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory access violation) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a COFF binary in which a relocation refers to a location after the end of the to-be-relocated section.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • 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