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Microsoft Windows SMBv3 suffers from a null pointer dereference in versions of Windows prior to the April, 2022 patch set. By sending a malformed FileNormalizedNameInformation SMBv3 request over a named pipe, an attacker can cause a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crash of the Windows kernel. For most systems, this attack requires authentication, except in the special case of Windows Domain Controllers, where unauthenticated users can always open named pipes as long as they can establish an SMB session. Typically, after the BSOD, the victim SMBv3 server will reboot.
CVSS 3.1 Base Score 7.5. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
CVSS 2.0 Base Score 7.8. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C).
While there are no complete fixes aside from conscientious programming, the following steps will go a long way to ensure that NULL pointer dereferences do not occur.
}
/* make use of pointer1 *//* ... */If you are working with a multithreaded or otherwise asynchronous environment, ensure that proper locking APIs are used to lock before the if statement; and unlock when it has finished.
This example takes an IP address from a user, verifies that it is well formed and then looks up the hostname and copies it into a buffer.
}
strcpy(hostname, hp->h_name);/*routine that ensures user_supplied_addr is in the right format for conversion */If an attacker provides an address that appears to be well-formed, but the address does not resolve to a hostname, then the call to gethostbyaddr() will return NULL. Since the code does not check the return value from gethostbyaddr (CWE-252), a NULL pointer dereference would then occur in the call to strcpy().
Note that this example is also vulnerable to a buffer overflow (see CWE-119).
In the following code, the programmer assumes that the system always has a property named "cmd" defined. If an attacker can control the program's environment so that "cmd" is not defined, the program throws a NULL pointer exception when it attempts to call the trim() method.
cmd = cmd.trim();This application has registered to handle a URL when sent an intent:
}......
}
}int length = URL.length();...The application assumes the URL will always be included in the intent. When the URL is not present, the call to getStringExtra() will return null, thus causing a null pointer exception when length() is called.
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