Improper Handling of Null Termination

Severity: Medium to Critical

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Description

Null termination-related bugs occur when software allows null terminators to be used in user data, without ensuring that these are removed/handled prior to passing them to lower-level functions. For instance, most filesystem-related functionality in PHP will stop looking at filenames after a null terminator, potentially cutting off critical data.

Security Impact

These bugs can allow an attacker to access data for which they are not permitted, tamper with data, or even gain code execution in some cases.

Remediation

Unless they are critical to application functionality, null terminators should be removed from user input or an exception should be thrown when they are detected.

References


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