CAPEC-129
Pointer Manipulation
This attack pattern involves an adversary manipulating a pointer within a target application resulting in the application accessing an unintended memory location. This can result in the crashing of the application or, for certain pointer values, access to data that would not normally be possible or the execution of arbitrary code. Since pointers are simply integer variables, Integer Attacks may often be used in Pointer Attacks.
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Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-129: Pointer Manipulation: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/129.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/129?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.
Prerequisites
The target application must have a pointer variable that the attacker can influence to hold an arbitrary value.
Resources required
None: No specialized resources are required to execute this type of attack.
Weaknesses it exploits
- CWE-682 Incorrect Calculation
- CWE-822 Untrusted Pointer Dereference
- CWE-823 Use of Out-of-range Pointer Offset
Recent CVEs with these weaknesses
- 6.5CVE-2026-115336
Incorrect quota accounting in Progress Software WS_FTP Server releases prior to 2025.0.5 on Windows could allow an authenticated user with upload and delete permissions to exceed storage quotas, potentially causing denial of service.
- 9.3CVE-2026-48705
MONAI (Medical Open Network for AI) is an AI toolkit for health care imaging. Prior to 1.6.1, PydicomReader._get_affine() trusts non-finite values in the DICOM PixelSpacing, ImagePositionPatient, and ImageOrientationPatient fields and comp…
- 8.2CVE-2026-121996
A length validation flaw in gdbserver's agent-expression parser allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to read uninitialized heap memory from the gdbserver process and cause a denial of service. Disclosed heap content includes addresses…
- 9.3CVE-2026-113780
ESF-IDF is the Espressif Internet of Things (IOT) Development Framework. From 5.5.5 until 5.5.6, 6.0.4, and 6.1.1, the esp_tee trap entry in esp_tee_vectors_plic.S and esp_tee_vectors_clic.S saves a caller-controlled register frame through…
- 7.8CVE-2026-87041
The RTIO submission-queue verifier rtio_vrfy_sqe() in subsys/rtio/rtio_syscalls.c (subsys/rtio/rtio_handlers.c before v4.3.0) accumulated the results of K_SYSCALL_MEMORY() into its valid_sqe flag with &=. That macro returns nonzero on fail…
- 8.8CVE-2026-16511
Two RTIO syscall verifiers, in subsys/rtio/rtio_syscalls.c (subsys/rtio/rtio_handlers.c before v4.3.0), did not validate user-supplied pointers before the kernel wrote through them. z_vrfy_rtio_sqe_cancel() performed no validation at all.…
- 7.0CVE-2026-115653
In Eclipse ThreadX versions 6.0.1 through 6.5.2.202603, the PendSV handler of the Cortex-M module ports saves a preempted user-mode module thread's registers in privileged mode at addresses taken from the thread's stack pointer, without ch…
- 8.8CVE-2026-74915
A web page that contains unusual WebGPU content loaded into the GPU GLES render process can trigger a OOB read and/or write crash in the GPU GLES user-space shared library. On certain platforms, when the process executing graphics workload…
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