CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-6560

Signed to Unsigned Conversion Error

Published: Mar 31, 2017 | Modified: Apr 20, 2025
CVSS 3.x
8.6
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
7.8 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

illumos osnet-incorporation bcopy() and bzero() implementations make signed instead of unsigned comparisons allowing a system crash.

Weakness

The product uses a signed primitive and performs a cast to an unsigned primitive, which can produce an unexpected value if the value of the signed primitive can not be represented using an unsigned primitive.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Illumos Illumos - (including) - (including)

Extended Description

It is dangerous to rely on implicit casts between signed and unsigned numbers because the result can take on an unexpected value and violate assumptions made by the program. Often, functions will return negative values to indicate a failure. When the result of a function is to be used as a size parameter, using these negative return values can have unexpected results. For example, if negative size values are passed to the standard memory copy or allocation functions they will be implicitly cast to a large unsigned value. This may lead to an exploitable buffer overflow or underflow condition.

References