CVE-2015-5555

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 by leveraging an unspecified "type confusion," a different vulnerability than CVE-2015-5554, CVE-2015-5558, and CVE-2015-5562.

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-37874 dos multiple verified text ยท 1 KB
Google Security Research ยท 2015-08-19

Adobe Flash - Type Confusion in TextRenderer.setAdvancedAntialiasingTable

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
Source: https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/detail?id=409&can=1&q=label%3AProduct-Flash%20modified-after%3A2015%2F8%2F17&sort=id

There is a type confusion issue in TextRenderer.setAdvancedAntialiasingTable. If the font, insideCutoff or outsideCutoff are set to objects that are not integers, they are still assumed to be integers. A proof-of-concept is below:

var antiAliasEntry_1 = {fontSize:10, insideCutoff:1.61, outsideCutoff:-3.43};
var antiAliasEntry_2 = {fontSize:"", insideCutoff:0.8, outsideCutoff:-0.8};
var arialTable:Array = new Array(antiAliasEntry_1, antiAliasEntry_2);

TextRenderer.setAdvancedAntialiasingTable("Arial", "none", "dark", arialTable);

This issue is low-impact because the type-confused objects are read into the font and cutoff values, which cannot be directly retreived from script. It is probably possible to determine the value read by doing hit tests on the text that is rendered (to see how big and clipped it is), but this would be fairly difficult.

A sample SWF and fla are attached, these samples intentionally crash to demonstrate the issue. 

Proof of Concept:
https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb-bin-sploits/-/raw/main/bin-sploits/37874.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 adobeair{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.180"}
adobe adobeair_sdk{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.180"}
adobe adobeair_sdk_\&_compiler{"endIncluding":"18.0.0.180"}
adobe adobeflash_player{"endIncluding":"11.2.202.491"}

References

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

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