CVE-2012-5612

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 21.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2012-12-03 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

Heap-based buffer overflow in Oracle MySQL 5.5.19 and other versions through 5.5.28, and MariaDB 5.5.28a and possibly other versions, allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code, as demonstrated using certain variations of the (1) USE, (2) SHOW TABLES, (3) DESCRIBE, (4) SHOW FIELDS FROM, (5) SHOW COLUMNS FROM, (6) SHOW INDEX FROM, (7) CREATE TABLE, (8) DROP TABLE, (9) ALTER TABLE, (10) DELETE FROM, (11) UPDATE, and (12) SET PASSWORD commands.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 10.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10
MariaDB: from 5.1.0 before 5.1.67; from 5.2.0 before 5.2.14; from 5.3.0 before 5.3.12; from 5.5.0 before 5.5.29; 10.0.0 — fixed in 5.1.67, 5.2.14, 5.3.12, 5.5.29
MySQL Server: from 5.5.0 through 5.5.28
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 11-sp2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 11-sp2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit: 11-sp2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: MariaDB 5.1.67, 5.2.14, 5.3.12, 5.5.29. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2012-5612 or the next vulnerability affects your stack