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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2018-19491

High
7.8/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in post.trm in Gnuplot 5.2.5. This issue allows an attacker to conduct a buffer overflow with an arbitrary amount of data in the PS_options function. This flaw is caused by a missing size check of an argument passed to the "set font" function. This issue occurs when the Gnuplot postscript terminal is used as a backend.

  • 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