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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-9052

Severity High
Score 9.8/10

Summary

An issue, also known as DW201703-006, was discovered in libdwarf 2017-03-21. A heap-based buffer over-read in dwarf_formsdata() is due to a failure to check a pointer for being in bounds (in a few places in this function) and a failure in a check in dwarf_attr_list().

  • 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