Vulnerability Spotlight: Type confusion
What is type confusion exactly? And how can it be used to exploit programs? According to the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) "Type confusion is when: the program allocates or initializes a resource such as a pointer, object, or variable using one type, but it later accesses that resource using a type that is incompatible with the original type. When the program accesses the resource using an incompatible type, this could trigger logical errors because the resource does not have expected properties. In languages without memory safety, such as C and C++, type confusion can lead to out-of-bounds memory access." C and C++ are common examples used because these languages do not have type checking. This allows attackers to potentially exploit type confusion within C/C++ programs, which can lead to code execution. Of course C and C++ are not the only examples, languages with dynamic typing generally (like Perl) have this issue. C++ has 3 main Cast...