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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-17484

High
9.8/10

Summary

The ucnv_UTF8FromUTF8 function in ucnv_u8.cpp in International Components for Unicode (ICU) for C/C++ through 60.1 mishandles ucnv_convertEx calls for UTF-8 to UTF-8 conversion, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (stack-based buffer overflow and application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted string, as demonstrated by ZNC.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • 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