CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-25187

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Published: Dec 14, 2020 | Modified: May 22, 2025
CVSS 3.x
9.8
CRITICAL
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
10 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Medtronic MyCareLink Smart 25000 is

 vulnerable when an authenticated attacker runs a debug command, which can be sent to the patient reader and cause a heap overflow event within the MCL Smart Patient Reader software stack. The heap overflow could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on the MCL Smart Patient Reader, potentially leading to control of the device

Weakness

A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Mycarelink_smart_model_25000_firmware Medtronic * *

Potential Mitigations

  • Use automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are offered by certain compilers or compiler extensions. Examples include: the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice, which provide various mechanisms including canary-based detection and range/index checking.
  • D3-SFCV (Stack Frame Canary Validation) from D3FEND [REF-1334] discusses canary-based detection in detail.
  • Run or compile the software using features or extensions that randomly arrange the positions of a program’s executable and libraries in memory. Because this makes the addresses unpredictable, it can prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to exploitable code.
  • Examples include Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) [REF-58] [REF-60] and Position-Independent Executables (PIE) [REF-64]. Imported modules may be similarly realigned if their default memory addresses conflict with other modules, in a process known as “rebasing” (for Windows) and “prelinking” (for Linux) [REF-1332] using randomly generated addresses. ASLR for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink since it would require relocating the libraries at run-time, defeating the whole purpose of prelinking.
  • For more information on these techniques see D3-SAOR (Segment Address Offset Randomization) from D3FEND [REF-1335].

References