CWE-122Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Description

Common consequences· 3

• Availability — DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)
  Buffer overflows generally lead to crashes. Other attacks leading to lack of availability are possible, including putting the program into an infinite loop.
• Integrity / Confidentiality / Availability / Access Control — Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, Bypass Protection Mechanism, Modify Memory
  Buffer overflows often can be used to execute arbitrary code, which is usually outside the scope of a program's implicit security policy. Besides important user data, heap-based overflows can be used to overwrite function pointers that may be living in memory, pointing it to the attacker's code. Even in applications that do not explicitly use function pointers, the run-time will usually leave many in memory. For example, object methods in C++ are generally implemented using function pointers. Even in C programs, there is often a global offset table used by the underlying runtime.
• Integrity / Confidentiality / Availability / Access Control / Other — Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, Bypass Protection Mechanism, Other
  When the consequence is arbitrary code execution, this can often be used to subvert any other security service.

Potential mitigations· 5

• []Pre-design: Use a language or compiler that performs automatic bounds checking.
• [Architecture and Design]Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.
• [Operation, Build and Compilation]
• [Operation, Build and Compilation]
• [Implementation]Implement and perform bounds checking on input.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 1

Exploits (incoming)1

(incoming)149

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Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.