Cyber Resilience

CVE-2024-48981

High

Published: 20 November 2024

Published
20 November 2024
Modified
25 November 2024
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0029 53.1th percentile
Risk Priority 15 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2024-48981 is a high-severity Classic Buffer Overflow (CWE-120) vulnerability in Arm Mbed. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).

Operationally, ranked in the top 46.9% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

An issue was discovered in MBed OS 6.16.0. During processing of HCI packets, the software dynamically determines the length of the packet header by looking up the identifying first byte and matching it against a table of possible lengths. The…

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initial parsing function, hciTrSerialRxIncoming does not drop packets with invalid identifiers but also does not set a safe default for the length of unknown packets' headers, leading to a buffer overflow. This can be leveraged into an arbitrary write by an attacker. It is possible to overwrite the pointer to a not-yet-allocated buffer that is supposed to receive the contents of the packet body. One can then overwrite the state variable used by the function to determine which state of packet parsing is currently occurring. Because the buffer is allocated when the last byte of the header has been copied, the combination of having a bad header length variable that will never match the counter variable and being able to overwrite the state variable with the resulting buffer overflow can be used to advance the function to the next step while skipping the buffer allocation and resulting pointer write. The next 16 bytes from the packet body are then written wherever the corrupted data pointer is pointing.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

arm
mbed
6.16.0

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-120

Platform-independent managed code eliminates the need for unchecked native buffer copies that are the root cause of classic buffer overflows.

References