CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-5131

Use After Free

Published: Jul 23, 2016 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
8.8
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
6.8 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V2
6.8 IMPORTANT
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V3
8.8 IMPORTANT
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

Use-after-free vulnerability in libxml2 through 2.9.4, as used in Google Chrome before 52.0.2743.82, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via vectors related to the XPointer range-to function.

Weakness

Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Chrome Google * 52.0.2743.82 (excluding)
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.5 for RHEL 7 RedHat ansible-tower-35/ansible-tower:3.5.6-1 *
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.6 for RHEL 7 RedHat ansible-tower-36/ansible-tower:3.6.4-1 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Supplementary RedHat chromium-browser-0:52.0.2743.82-1.el6 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RedHat libxml2-0:2.9.1-6.el7.4 *
Red Hat JBoss Core Services 1 RedHat *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu devel *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu precise *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu trusty *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu upstream *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu wily *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu xenial *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu yakkety *
Chromium-browser Ubuntu zesty *
Libxml2 Ubuntu precise *
Libxml2 Ubuntu trusty *
Libxml2 Ubuntu upstream *
Libxml2 Ubuntu vivid/stable-phone-overlay *
Libxml2 Ubuntu wily *
Libxml2 Ubuntu xenial *
Libxml2 Ubuntu yakkety *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu devel *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu trusty *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu upstream *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu vivid/stable-phone-overlay *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu wily *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu xenial *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu yakkety *
Oxide-qt Ubuntu zesty *

Extended Description

The use of previously-freed memory can have any number of adverse consequences, ranging from the corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code, depending on the instantiation and timing of the flaw. The simplest way data corruption may occur involves the system’s reuse of the freed memory. Use-after-free errors have two common and sometimes overlapping causes:

In this scenario, the memory in question is allocated to another pointer validly at some point after it has been freed. The original pointer to the freed memory is used again and points to somewhere within the new allocation. As the data is changed, it corrupts the validly used memory; this induces undefined behavior in the process. If the newly allocated data happens to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved.

Potential Mitigations

References