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National Vulnerability Database

National Vulnerability Database

NVD

National Vulnerability Database
  1. Vulnerabilities

CVE-2006-0459 Detail

Description

flex.skl in Will Estes and John Millaway Fast Lexical Analyzer Generator (flex) before 2.5.33 does not allocate enough memory for grammars containing (1) REJECT statements or (2) trailing context rules, which causes flex to generate code that contains a buffer overflow that might allow context-dependent attackers to execute arbitrary code.


Metrics

 
NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

Vendor Statements (disclaimer)

Official Statement from Red Hat (08/16/2006)

This issue only affects parsers which are generated by grammars which either use REJECT or rules with a variable trailing context (in these rules the parser has to keep all backtracking paths). The Red Hat Security Response Team analysed all packages that include flex generated parsers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2.1, 3, and 4) and found none were vulnerable.

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/flex/flex-2.5.33.tar.bz2?download CVE, Inc., Red Hat Product 
http://secunia.com/advisories/19071 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Patch  Vendor Advisory 
http://secunia.com/advisories/19126 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Vendor Advisory 
http://secunia.com/advisories/19228 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Vendor Advisory 
http://secunia.com/advisories/19424 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Patch  Vendor Advisory 
http://securityreason.com/securityalert/570 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Third Party Advisory 
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=20060223020346.GA11231%40tabitha.home.tldz.org&forum_name=flex-announce CVE, Inc., Red Hat Release Notes 
http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/glsa-200603-07.xml CVE, Inc., Red Hat Third Party Advisory 
http://www.osvdb.org/23440 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Broken Link  Patch 
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/16896 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Patch  Third Party Advisory  VDB Entry 
http://www.us.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1020 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Patch  Vendor Advisory 
http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2006/0770 CVE, Inc., Red Hat Broken Link  URL Repurposed 
https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/24995 CVE, Inc., Red Hat VDB Entry 
https://usn.ubuntu.com/260-1/ CVE, Inc., Red Hat Third Party Advisory 

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer cwe source acceptance level NIST  

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Change History

6 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2006-0459
NVD Published Date:
03/29/2006
NVD Last Modified:
04/02/2025
Source:
Red Hat, Inc.