An exploitable signed comparison vulnerability exists in the ARMv7 memcpy() implementation of GNU glibc 2.30.9000. Calling memcpy() (on ARMv7 targets that utilize the GNU glibc implementation) with a negative value for the num parameter results in a signed comparison vulnerability. If an attacker underflows the num parameter to memcpy(), this vulnerability could lead to undefined behavior such as writing to out-of-bounds memory and potentially remote code execution. Furthermore, this memcpy() implementation allows for program execution to continue in scenarios where a segmentation fault or crash should have occurred. The dangers occur in that subsequent execution and iterations of this code will be executed with this corrupted data.
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.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glibc | Gnu | * | 2.31 (including) |
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.