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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2021-20204

High
9.8/10

Summary

A heap memory corruption problem (use after free) can be triggered in libgetdata v0.10.0 when processing maliciously crafted dirfile databases. This degrades the confidentiality, integrity and availability of third-party software that uses libgetdata as a library. This vulnerability may lead to arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation depending on input/skills of attacker.

  • 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