Walied Assar has discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is caused due to an integer overflow error in the linker utility (link.exe) when allocating memory based on the number of COFF symbols. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted Portable Executable (PE) file.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires tricking a user into processing a specially crafted file via e.g. "dumpbin" or "link /dump" utilities.

The vulnerability is confirmed in version 9.00.21022.08. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Do not process files from untrusted sources.

Provided and/or discovered by
Walied Assar

Original Advisory
http://waleedassar.blogspot.com/2012/04/microsoft-incremental-linker-integer.html

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