CVE-2015-5549

critical
Published 2015-08-14 ยท Modified 2026-05-06
CVSS v3
โ€”
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
10.0

Description

Adobe Flash Player before 18.0.0.232 on Windows and OS X and before 11.2.202.508 on Linux, Adobe AIR before 18.0.0.199, Adobe AIR SDK before 18.0.0.199, and Adobe AIR SDK & Compiler before 18.0.0.199 allow attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (memory corruption) via unspecified vectors, a different vulnerability than CVE-2015-5544, CVE-2015-5545, CVE-2015-5546, CVE-2015-5547, CVE-2015-5548, CVE-2015-5552, and CVE-2015-5553.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA
โ€”

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or โ€” if you've already worked around this in production โ€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

โœš Propose a mitigation on Community โ†’ Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-37872 dos multiple verified text ยท 1 KB
Google Security Research ยท 2015-08-19

Adobe Flash - Bad Write in XML When Callback Modifies XML Tree During Property Delete

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
Source: https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/detail?id=404&can=1&q=label%3AProduct-Flash%20modified-after%3A2015%2F8%2F17&sort=id

Source file and compiled PoC attached.

Looking at https://github.com/adobe-flash/avmplus/blob/master/core/XMLListObject.cpp:

bool XMLListObject::delUintProperty(uint32_t index)
...
if (index >= _length())      [1]
        {
            return true;
        }
...
    px->childChanges(core->knodeRemoved, r->atom());  [2]
...
    m_children.removeAt(index);   [3]

In [1], the passed in index is validated. In [2], the callback can run actionscript, which might shrink the size of the current XMLList. In [3], the pre-validated index is used but it might now be invalid due to shrinking at [2]. Unfortunately, removeAt() does not behave well in the presence of an out-of-bounds index.

The PoC works by triggering a wild copy in order to demonstrate the crash. But other side-effects are possible such as decrementing the refcount of an out-of-bounds index.

Proof of Concept:
https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb-bin-sploits/-/raw/main/bin-sploits/37872.zip

OS impact

linux Linux kernel Fixed 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
- Not affected โ€”
macos macOS Fixed 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
- Not affected โ€”

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
adobe adobeflash_player{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.209"}
adobe adobeair{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.180"}
adobe adobeair_sdk{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.180"}
adobe adobeair_sdk_\&_compiler{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.180"}

References

CWEs

CWE-119

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.