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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2021-3571

High
7.1/10

Summary

A flaw was found in the ptp4l program of the linuxptp package. When ptp4l is operating on a little-endian architecture as a PTP transparent clock, a remote attacker could send a crafted one-step sync message to cause an information leak or crash. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and system availability. This flaw affects linuxptp versions before 3.1.1 and before 2.0.1.

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