Chapter 4. NULL Pointer FTW
Note
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Dear Diary,
I found a really beautiful bug today: a type conversion vulnerability leading to a NULL pointer dereference (see Section A.2). Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be a big deal, since the bug affects a user space library, which generally means that at worst it would crash a user space application. But this bug is different from the average user space NULL pointer dereferences, and it’s possible to exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code.
The vulnerability affects the FFmpeg multimedia library that is used by many popular software projects, including Google Chrome, VLC media player, MPlayer, and Xine to name just a few. There are also rumors that YouTube uses ...
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