![]() However, if an attacker can cause this check to fail due to an integer overflow vulnerability, the vulnerability becomes exploitable again.Īnother application of integer overflow and underflows is defeating checks to determine if a value meets certain criteria, like ensuring that an account has a certain minimum balance before initiating a withdrawal. The solution to this vulnerability is to ensure that the length of the user input is shorter than the size of the available buffer. The main reason for this is that these vulnerabilities can invalidate checks made to protect against other classes of vulnerabilities.įor example, a buffer overflow vulnerability is created when a developer fails to check the length of user-controlled input before placing it in a preallocated memory buffer. Integer overflow and underflow vulnerabilities are useful to hackers in a number of different ways. Exploitation of integer overflows and underflows The result is an unsigned variable that contains the maximum value that it can hold. Subtracting one from this value should result in a value of negative one however, unsigned variables can’t store negative numbers. When this occurs, the value wraps around from the minimum value that can be stored to the maximum.įor example, consider an unsigned variable with a current value of zero. Integer overflows occur when a value exceeds the maximum value that a variable can contain, and integer underflows happen when a value becomes too small to fit. An unsafe cast from unsigned to signed of a value with a one in the most significant bit changes it from a large positive number to a negative one. Both a signed and an unsigned short are stored in two bytes, but the most significant bit of a signed short indicates whether it is positive or negative. Integer overflows can also occur when typecasting from an unsigned to a signed variable type. ![]() If any of the bits that are dropped are non-zero, then the value suddenly becomes a lot smaller. This is accomplished by cutting the value down to a small enough size that it fits in the smaller value. One example is downcasting from a long (which has eight bytes allocated to it) to an int (which uses two or four bytes). Integer overflow vulnerabilities are caused when a value is moved into a variable type too small to hold it. However, in other cases, the result of an unsafe typecast is nonsense. ![]() It is generally permitted to convert between these different types and, in many cases, the results actually make sense. Integer overflow and underflow vulnerabilities boil down to unsafe conversion between signed and unsigned variables and integer variable types of different sizes. Programming languages have the concepts of short, integer, long and beyond, each of which defines the size of the memory space allocated for that variable and the range of values that it can contain. The other main distinction between different “integer” variable types is the size of the value that they can contain. ![]() In a signed value, a leading one means a negative number, while in an unsigned value, a one in the first spot just means a large number. The only difference is how the value is interpreted. An unsigned variable, on the other hand, can only store positive numbers.Īs shown in the image above, signed and unsigned variables of a given size are written identically in a computer’s memory. A signed integer (as the name suggests) has a sign, allowing it to store both positive and negative values. Most programming languages have the concept of signed and unsigned integers. However, beyond these general types are additional distinctions between variables, and these distinctions are what make integer overflow and underflow vulnerabilities possible. A character, which can contain text data, is very different from an integer or a float. Every programming language has the concept of different types of variables.
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