#c++

In this series, we have explored the need for proactive measures to eliminate a class of vulnerabilities and walked through some examples of memory safety issues we’ve found in Microsoft code that could have been avoided with a different language. Now we’ll peek at why we think that Rust represents the best alternative to C and C++ currently available.

In our first post in this series, we discussed the need for proactively addressing memory safety issues. Tools and guidance are demonstrably not preventing this class of vulnerabilities; memory safety issues have represented almost the same proportion of vulnerabilities assigned a CVE for over a decade. We feel that using memory-safe languages will mitigate this in ways that tools and training have not been able to.

What if we could eliminate an entire class of vulnerabilities before they ever happened? Since 2004, the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) has triaged every reported Microsoft security vulnerability. From all that triage one astonishing fact sticks out: as Matt Miller discussed in his 2019 presentation at BlueHat IL, the majority of vulnerabilities fixed and with a CVE assigned are caused by developers inadvertently inserting memory corruption bugs into their C and C++ code.

What if we could eliminate an entire class of vulnerabilities before they ever happened? Since 2004, the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) has triaged every reported Microsoft security vulnerability. From all that triage one astonishing fact sticks out: as Matt Miller discussed in his 2019 presentation at BlueHat IL, the majority of vulnerabilities fixed and with a CVE assigned are caused by developers inadvertently inserting memory corruption bugs into their C and C++ code.

jhead 3.03 is affected by: Buffer Overflow. The impact is: Denial of service. The component is: gpsinfo.c Line 151 ProcessGpsInfo(). The attack vector is: Open a specially crafted JPEG file.

An issue was discovered in libsox.a in SoX 14.4.2. In sox-fmt.h (startread function), there is an integer overflow on the result of integer addition (wraparound to 0) fed into the lsx_calloc macro that wraps malloc. When a NULL pointer is returned, it is used without a prior check that it is a valid pointer, leading to a NULL pointer dereference on lsx_readbuf in formats_i.c.

There is an out-of-bounds read in Exiv2::MrwImage::readMetadata in mrwimage.cpp in Exiv2 through 0.27.2.

ImageMagick 7.0.8-50 Q16 has a heap-based buffer over-read in MagickCore/fourier.c in ComplexImages.

ImageMagick 7.0.8-50 Q16 has memory leaks at AcquireMagickMemory because of a wand/mogrify.c error.

http.c in Exiv2 through 0.27.1 allows a malicious http server to cause a denial of service (crash due to a NULL pointer dereference) by returning a crafted response that lacks a space character.