CVE-2008-3142

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 4.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2008-08-01 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-120

Description

Multiple buffer overflows in Python 2.5.2 and earlier on 32bit platforms allow context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or have unspecified other impact via a long string that leads to incorrect memory allocation during Unicode string processing, related to the unicode_resize function and the PyMem_RESIZE macro.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04
Debian Linux: 4.0
Python: before 2.4.6; from 2.5.0 before 2.5.3 — fixed in 2.4.6, 2.5.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Python 2.4.6, 2.5.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232137
http://bugs.python.org/file10825/issue2620-gps02-patch.txt
http://bugs.python.org/issue2620
http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2009/Feb/msg00000.html
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2008-08/msg00006.html
http://secunia.com/advisories/31305
http://secunia.com/advisories/31332
http://secunia.com/advisories/31358
http://secunia.com/advisories/31365
http://secunia.com/advisories/31473
http://secunia.com/advisories/31518
http://secunia.com/advisories/31687

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