What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-5180

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 8.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2016-10-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-787

Description

Heap-based buffer overflow in the ares_create_query function in c-ares 1.x before 1.12.0 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds write) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a hostname with an escaped trailing dot.

Affected products

• c-ares: 1.0.0, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1, 1.3.0, 1.3.1 (+17)
• C-Ares Project C-Ares: 1.11.0
• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04, 16.04, 16.10
• Debian Linux: 8.0
• Node.js: from 0.10.0 before 0.10.48; from 0.12.0 before 0.12.17; from 4.0.0 before 4.6.1 — fixed in 0.10.48, 0.12.17, 4.6.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Node.js 0.10.48, 0.12.17, 4.6.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017-0002.html
• http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3682
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/93243
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-3143-1
• https://c-ares.haxx.se/CVE-2016-5180.patch
• https://c-ares.haxx.se/adv_20160929.html
• https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.in/2016/09/stable-channel-updates-for-chrome-os.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201701-28
• https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2017-01-01.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017-0002.html
• http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3682
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/93243

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