Vulnerabilities > CVE-2016-4977 - Data Processing Errors vulnerability in Pivotal Spring Security Oauth

Buffer Overflow attacks target improper or missing bounds checking on buffer operations, typically triggered by input injected by an attacker. As a consequence, an attacker is able to write past the boundaries of allocated buffer regions in memory, causing a program crash or potentially redirection of execution as per the attackers' choice.

Applications often need to transform data in and out of the XML format by using an XML parser. It may be possible for an attacker to inject data that may have an adverse effect on the XML parser when it is being processed. By nesting XML data and causing this data to be continuously self-referential, an attacker can cause the XML parser to consume more resources while processing, causing excessive memory consumption and CPU utilization. An attacker's goal is to leverage parser failure to his or her advantage. In most cases this type of an attack will result in a denial of service due to an application becoming unstable, freezing, or crash. However it may be possible to cause a crash resulting in arbitrary code execution, leading to a jump from the data plane to the control plane [R.230.1].

Applications often need to transform data in and out of the XML format by using an XML parser. It may be possible for an attacker to inject data that may have an adverse effect on the XML parser when it is being processed. By supplying oversized payloads in input vectors that will be processed by the XML parser, an attacker can cause the XML parser to consume more resources while processing, causing excessive memory consumption and CPU utilization, and potentially cause execution of arbitrary code. An attacker's goal is to leverage parser failure to his or her advantage. In many cases this type of an attack will result in a denial of service due to an application becoming unstable, freezing, or crash. However it is possible to cause a crash resulting in arbitrary code execution, leading to a jump from the data plane to the control plane [R.231.1].

Client applications such as web browsers that process HTML data often need to transform data in and out of the XML format by using an XML parser. It may be possible for an attacker to inject data that may have an adverse effect on the XML parser when it is being processed. These adverse effects may include the parser crashing, consuming too much of a resource, executing too slowly, executing code supplied by an attacker, allowing usage of unintended system functionality, etc. An attacker's goal is to leverage parser failure to his or her advantage. In some cases it may be possible to jump from the data plane to the control plane via bad data being passed to an XML parser. [R.484.1]

Applications often need to transform data in and out of the XML format by using an XML parser. It may be possible for an attacker to inject data that may have an adverse effect on the XML parser when it is being processed. These adverse effects may include the parser crashing, consuming too much of a resource, executing too slowly, executing code supplied by an attacker, allowing usage of unintended system functionality, etc. An attacker's goal is to leverage parser failure to his or her advantage. In some cases it may be possible to jump from the data plane to the control plane via bad data being passed to an XML parser. [R.99.1]