CVE-2008-3908

Severity: critical (CVSS 10.0 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 4.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2008-09-04 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-119

Description

Multiple buffer overflows in Princeton WordNet (wn) 3.0 allow context-dependent attackers to execute arbitrary code via (1) a long argument on the command line; a long (2) WNSEARCHDIR, (3) WNHOME, or (4) WNDBVERSION environment variable; or (5) a user-supplied dictionary (aka data file). NOTE: since WordNet itself does not run with special privileges, this issue only crosses privilege boundaries when WordNet is invoked as a third party component.

Affected products

Princeton University Wordnet: 3.0

References

http://secunia.com/advisories/32184
http://securityreason.com/securityalert/4217
http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/glsa-200810-01.xml
http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2008-014.html
http://www.ocert.org/analysis/2008-014/analysis.txt
http://www.ocert.org/analysis/2008-014/wordnet.patch
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/495883/100/0/threaded
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/30958
https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/44848
https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/44849
https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/44850
https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/44851

Get alerted when CVE-2008-3908 or the next vulnerability affects your stack