Untrusted pointer dereference for some Intel(R) QAT Windows software before version 2.6.0. within Ring 3: User Applications may allow an information disclosure. System software adversary with an authenticated user combined with a low complexity attack may enable data exposure. This result may potentially occur via local access when attack requirements are not present without special internal knowledge and requires no user interaction. The potential vulnerability may impact the confidentiality (high), integrity (none) and availability (none) of the vulnerable system, resulting in subsequent system confidentiality (none), integrity (none) and availability (none) impacts.
The product obtains a value from an untrusted source, converts this value to a pointer, and dereferences the resulting pointer.
An attacker can supply a pointer for memory locations that the product is not expecting. If the pointer is dereferenced for a write operation, the attack might allow modification of critical state variables, cause a crash, or execute code. If the dereferencing operation is for a read, then the attack might allow reading of sensitive data, cause a crash, or set a variable to an unexpected value (since the value will be read from an unexpected memory location). There are several variants of this weakness, including but not necessarily limited to: