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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2021-3507

Severity Medium
Score 6.1/10

Summary

A heap buffer overflow was found in the floppy disk emulator of QEMU up to 6.0.0 (including). It could occur in fdctrl_transfer_handler() in hw/block/fdc.c while processing DMA read data transfers from the floppy drive to the guest system. A privileged guest user could use this flaw to crash the QEMU process on the host resulting in DoS scenario, or potential information leakage from the host memory.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • HIGH
  • LOW

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