78%
18%
98%
In shiftfs, a non-upstream patch to the Linux kernel included in the Ubuntu 5.0 and 5.3 kernel series, shiftfs_btrfs_ioctl_fd_replace() calls fdget(oldfd), then without further checks passes the resulting file* into shiftfs_real_fdget(), which casts file->private_data, a void* that points to a filesystem-dependent type, to a "struct shiftfs_file_info *". As the private_data is not required to be a pointer, an attacker can use this to cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code.
In shiftfs, a non-upstream patch to the Linux kernel included in the Ubuntu 5.0 and 5.3 kernel series, shiftfs_btrfs_ioctl_fd_replace() calls fdget(oldfd), then without further checks passes the resulting file* into shiftfs_real_fdget(), which casts file->private_data, a void* that points to a filesystem-dependent type, to a "struct shiftfs_file_info *". As the private_data is not required to be a pointer, an attacker can use this to cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code.
CVSS 3.1 Base Score 7.8. CVSS Attack Vector: local. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).
CVSS 2.0 Base Score 4.6. CVSS Attack Vector: local. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P).
The following Perl code is intended to look up the privileges for user ID's between 0 and 3, by performing an access of the $UserPrivilegeArray reference. It is expected that only userID 3 is an admin (since this is listed in the third element of the array).
print "\$UserPrivilegeArray = $UserPrivilegeArray\n";print "Regular user!\n";print "Admin!\n";In this case, the programmer intended to use "$UserPrivilegeArray->{$userID}" to access the proper position in the array. But because the subscript was omitted, the "user" string was compared to the scalar representation of the $UserPrivilegeArray reference, which might be of the form "ARRAY(0x229e8)" or similar.
Since the logic also "fails open" (CWE-636), the result of this bug is that all users are assigned administrator privileges.
While this is a forced example, it demonstrates how type confusion can have security consequences, even in memory-safe languages.
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