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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2018-5178

High
8.1/10

Summary

A buffer overflow was found during UTF8 to Unicode string conversion within JavaScript with extremely large amounts of data. This vulnerability requires the use of a malicious or vulnerable legacy extension in order to occur. This vulnerability affects Thunderbird ESR < 52.8, Thunderbird < 52.8, and Firefox ESR < 52.8.

  • HIGH
  • 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