CVE-2021-28638 - Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Severity

78%

Complexity

18%

Confidentiality

98%

Acrobat Reader DC versions 2021.005.20054 (and earlier), 2020.004.30005 (and earlier) and 2017.011.30197 (and earlier) are affected by a Heap-based Buffer overflow vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker could leverage this vulnerability to achieve arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. Exploitation of this issue requires user interaction in that a victim must open a malicious file.

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:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).

CVSS 2.0 Base Score 6.8. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: medium. CVSS Vector: (AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P).

Demo Examples

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

CWE-122

While buffer overflow examples can be rather complex, it is possible to have very simple, yet still exploitable, heap-based buffer overflows:


               
}
strcpy(buf, argv[1]);

The buffer is allocated heap memory with a fixed size, but there is no guarantee the string in argv[1] will not exceed this size and cause an overflow.

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

CWE-122

This example applies an encoding procedure to an input string and stores it into a buffer.


               
}
return dst_buf;
die("user string too long, die evil hacker!");
else dst_buf[dst_index++] = user_supplied_string[i];
dst_buf[dst_index++] = ';';
/* encode to < */

The programmer attempts to encode the ampersand character in the user-controlled string, however the length of the string is validated before the encoding procedure is applied. Furthermore, the programmer assumes encoding expansion will only expand a given character by a factor of 4, while the encoding of the ampersand expands by 5. As a result, when the encoding procedure expands the string it is possible to overflow the destination buffer if the attacker provides a string of many ampersands.

Overview

First reported 3 years ago

2021-08-20 19:15:00

Last updated 3 years ago

2021-08-31 16:40:00

Affected Software

Adobe Acrobat Reader Dc - Classic Track

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