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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-17482

Severity High
Score 7.8/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in OpenVMS through V8.4-2L2 on Alpha and through V8.4-2L1 on IA64, and VAX/VMS 4.0 and later. A malformed DCL command table may result in a buffer overflow allowing a local privilege escalation when a non-privileged account enters a crafted command line. This bug is exploitable on VAX and Alpha and may cause a process crash on IA64. Software was affected regardless of whether it was directly shipped by VMS Software, Inc. (VSI), HPE, HP, Compaq, or Digital Equipment Corporation.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • 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