A use-after-free in Busybox's awk applet leads to denial of service and possibly code execution when processing a crafted awk pattern in the

Affected versions

NVD version ranges (for catalog products). Add the product to your stack with a version and matching uses these.

• busybox busybox1.18.0 and later · up to 1.33.1 inclusive
• fedoraproject fedora33
• fedoraproject fedora34

Versions reported by the vendor

Affected version ranges reported by the assigning authority (JFROG). Independent of NVD's CPE analysis and usually ahead of it.

• busybox busybox

  • unspecified and later · before 1.34.0affected

Package-level exposure

OSV and GitHub Advisory data: ecosystem, package and range. SBOM matching uses this table.

Other highest-scoring records for the same primary product.

• CVE-2018-1000517BusyBox project BusyBox wget version prior to commit 8e2174e9bd836e53c8b9c6e00d1bc6e2a718686e contains a Buffer Overflow vulnerability in Bu
  49Plan
• CVE-2016-2148Heap-based buffer overflow in the DHCP client (udhcpc) in BusyBox before 1.25.0 allows remote attackers to have unspecified impact via vecto
  47Plan
• CVE-2022-48174There is a stack overflow vulnerability in ash.c:6030 in busybox before 1.35.
  40Plan
• CVE-2021-42377An attacker-controlled pointer free in Busybox's hush applet leads to denial of service and possible code execution when processing a crafte
  40Plan
• CVE-2017-16544In the add_match function in libbb/lineedit.c in BusyBox through 1.27.2, the tab autocomplete feature of the shell, used to get a list of fi
  37Monitor
• CVE-2022-28391BusyBox through 1.35.0 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code if netstat is used to print a DNS PTR record's value to a VT compat
  36Monitor

FIRST EPSS daily score; only changes of 0.01 or more are recorded (step chart).

Root cause

After a memory region is freed, another reference pointing to it is still used. By then, the same region may have been allocated for different data.

A representative example of this vulnerability class. Not the vendor's source code; it shows the faulty pattern and its fix.

1free(dev->buf);2/* ... another thread is still running ... */3process(dev->buf);

1lock(&dev->lock);2free(dev->buf);3dev->buf = NULL;4unlock(&dev->lock);

Attack context

MITRE CAPEC attack patterns and ATT&CK techniques for this weakness class (CWE). A starting point for detection rules and threat hunting.

MITRE has no CAPEC/ATT&CK mapping for this CWE.