Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-15749 - Use of Externally-Controlled Format String vulnerability in Pulsesecure Pulse Secure Desktop Client

047910
CVSS 2.1 - LOW
Attack vector
LOCAL
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
PARTIAL
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE
local
low complexity
pulsesecure
CWE-134

Summary

The Pulse Secure Desktop (macOS) 5.3RX before 5.3R5 and 9.0R1 has a Format String Vulnerability.

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Format String Injection
    An attacker includes formatting characters in a string input field on the target application. Most applications assume that users will provide static text and may respond unpredictably to the presence of formatting character. For example, in certain functions of the C programming languages such as printf, the formatting character %s will print the contents of a memory location expecting this location to identify a string and the formatting character %n prints the number of DWORD written in the memory. An attacker can use this to read or write to memory locations or files, or simply to manipulate the value of the resulting text in unexpected ways. Reading or writing memory may result in program crashes and writing memory could result in the execution of arbitrary code if the attacker can write to the program stack.
  • String Format Overflow in syslog()
    This attack targets the format string vulnerabilities in the syslog() function. An attacker would typically inject malicious input in the format string parameter of the syslog function. This is a common problem, and many public vulnerabilities and associated exploits have been posted.