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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-9106

Severity High
Score 7.5/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in adns before 1.5.2. adns_rr_info mishandles a bogus *datap. The general pattern for formatting integers is to sprintf into a fixed-size buffer. This is correct if the input is in the right range; if it isn't, the buffer may be overrun (depending on the sizes of the types on the current platform). Of course the inputs ought to be right. And there are pointers in there too, so perhaps one could say that the caller ought to check these things. It may be better to require the caller to make the pointer structure right, but to have the code here be defensive about (and tolerate with an error but without crashing) out-of-range integer values. So: it should defend each of these integer conversion sites with a check for the actual permitted range, and return adns_s_invaliddata if not. The lack of this check causes the SOA sign extension bug to be a serious security problem: the sign extended SOA value is out of range, and overruns the buffer when reconverted. This is related to sign extending SOA 32-bit integer fields, and use of a signed data type.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • 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