Malicious Cyber Actors Use Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities to Compromise Software: FBI

Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are a prevalent type of memory safety software design defect that regularly leads to system compromise.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation recognise that memory safety vulnerabilities encompass a wide range of issues, requiring significant time and effort to resolve properly.

While all types of memory safety vulnerabilities can be prevented by using memory-safe languages during development, other mitigations may only address certain types of memory safety vulnerabilities.

Regardless, buffer overflow vulnerabilities are a well-understood subset of memory safety vulnerability and can be addressed using memory-safe languages and other proven techniques listed in this Alert.

Despite the existence of well-documented, effective mitigations for buffer overflow vulnerabilities, many manufacturers continue to use unsafe software development practices that allow these vulnerabilities to persist.

For these reasons—as well as the damage exploitation of these defects can cause—CISA, FBI, and others designate buffer overflow vulnerabilities as unforgivable defects.

CISA and FBI maintain that unsafe software development practices that allow the persistence of buffer overflow vulnerabilities—especially memory-unsafe programming languages—pose unacceptable risks to our national and economic security.

As such, CISA and FBI urged manufacturers to use proven prevention methods and mitigations to eliminate this class of defect while urging software customers to demand secure products from manufacturers that include these preventions.

This Alert outlines proven methods to prevent or mitigate buffer overflow vulnerabilities based on secure by design principles and software development best practices. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities (CWE-119) arise when threat actors access or write information in the wrong part of a computer’s memory (i.e., outside the memory buffer).

These vulnerabilities can occur in two main memory regions in which buffers are managed: stack-based overflows (CWE-121) (allocated on a memory stack) and heap-based overflows (CWE-122) (allocated on a memory heap).

Buffer overflow vulnerabilities pose serious security risks, as they may lead to data corruption, sensitive data exposure, program crashes, and unauthorized code execution.

Threat actors frequently exploit these vulnerabilities to gain initial access to an organization’s network and then move laterally to the wider network.