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Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability
CVSS 3.1 Base Score 7.5. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: high. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).
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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