Headline
CVE-2023-48235: overflow in ex address parsing
Vim is an open source command line text editor. When parsing relative ex addresses one may unintentionally cause an
overflow. Ironically this happens in the existing overflow check, because the line number becomes negative and LONG_MAX - lnum will cause the overflow. Impact is low, user interaction is required and a crash may not even happen in all situations. This issue has been addressed in commit 060623e which has been included in release version 9.0.2110. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
Date: 16.11.2023
Severity: Low
When parsing relative ex addresses one may unintentionally cause an
overflow. Ironacially this happens in the existing overflow check, because
the line number becomes negative and LONG_MAX - lnum will cause the overflow.
Impact is low, user interaction is required and a crash may not even happen.
So verify that the line numer is actually positive before doing the actual overflow
check.
The Vim project would like to thank Fabian Toepfer for reporting this issue
which is now fixed in Vim patch 9.0.2110.
Related news
Ubuntu Security Notice 6557-1 - It was discovered that Vim could be made to dereference invalid memory. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It was discovered that Vim could be made to recurse infinitely. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.