Typical severity: High. Likelihood of attack: High. This attack pattern involves causing a buffer overflow through manipulation of environment variables. Once the adversary finds that they can modify an environment variable, they may try to overflow associated buffers. This attack leverages implicit trust often placed in environment variables.
Do not expose environment variable to the user. | Do not use untrusted data in your environment variables. | Use a language or compiler that performs automatic bounds checking | There are tools such as Sharefuzz [REF-2] which is an environment variable fuzzer for Unix that support loading a shared library. You can use Sharefuzz to determine if you are exposing an environment variable vulnerable to buffer overflow.