TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative
 

Microsoft Excel Series Record Parsing Type Mismatch Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI-12-157: August 22nd, 2012

CVE ID

CVSS Score

Affected Vendors

Affected Products

    Office

TippingPoint™ IPS Customer Protection

TippingPoint IPS customers are protected against this vulnerability by Digital Vaccine protection filter ID 12480. For further product information on the TippingPoint IPS:

Vulnerability Details


This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Microsoft Office Excel. User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file.

The specific flaw exists within the parsing of Series records. The code within Excel.exe makes an assumption about the data types within a Series record and can be made to write beyond the bounds of a heap buffer when a specific combination of fields are set to unexpected values. This corruption can be leveraged to achieve code execution under the context of the user running the application.

Vendor Response

Microsoft has issued an update to correct this vulnerability. More details can be found at:

Disclosure Timeline

    2012-01-24 - Vulnerability reported to vendor
    2012-08-22 - Coordinated public release of advisory

Credit

This vulnerability was discovered by:
    Anonymous