Executive brief
NASA openVSP, a tool used for designing 3D aircraft models, is vulnerable to a flaw that can cause the application to crash. By entering an excessively long name for a design component, a user can trigger a memory error that shuts down the software. This results in a denial of service, potentially causing loss of unsaved engineering work or interrupting design operations.
Technical details
A classic buffer overflow (CWE-120) exists in NASA openVSP version 3.16.1 due to insufficient input validation in the geometry name field. A local attacker can trigger this vulnerability by navigating to the 'Geom browser' interface and pasting a 5000-byte payload into the 'name' input field during the addition of a 'pod' component. This action causes a memory corruption that leads to an immediate application crash (Denial of Service). The vulnerability was demonstrated on Windows x86-64 platforms. While the repository was archived in 2018, users should be aware that no official patch is noted in the advisory for this legacy version.
Affected products
- NASA openVSP 3.16.1
Timeline
- 2018-08-28: disclosed: Initial discovery and PoC by researcher L0RD
- 2018-08-29: other: Exploit published on Exploit-DB
- 2018-09-08: other: GitHub repository archived by owner
- 2026-05-25: advisory: CVE published/updated by VulnCheck and NVD