Variant weakness
Draft
CWE-196: Unsigned to Signed Conversion Error
The product uses an unsigned primitive and performs a cast to a signed primitive, which can produce an unexpected value if the value of the unsigned primitive can not be represented using a signed primitive.
2
Recorded CVEs
With this primary weakness
0
KEVs
In the CISA KEV catalog
Medium
Likelihood of exploit
Per MITRE
Variant
Abstraction
MITRE classification
Overview
Although less frequent an issue than signed-to-unsigned conversion, unsigned-to-signed conversion can be the perfect precursor to dangerous buffer underwrite conditions that allow attackers to move down the stack where they otherwise might not have access in a normal buffer overflow condition. Buffer underwrites occur frequently when large unsigned values are cast to signed values, and then used as indexes into a buffer or for pointer arithmetic.