Yes it was bound to happen – your printer driver can cause a cybersecurity breach: https://voidsec.com/root-cause-analysis-of-cve-2021-3438/ (voidsec blog site)
It is interesting to note the Conclusion of the blogpost:
Conclusion
The buffer, initialized with all zeroes, is the only reference in all of the data segments and it is only used in the highlighted strncpy
operations; there are no pointers nor interesting structures written inside it that we can corrupt to redirect the execution flow.
This vulnerability can, at best, be used to perform a local Denial of Service (DoS) crashing the entire OS.
Given all the above analysis, and threat risk, I think a more appropriate CVSS score is 6.5, rather than the arbitrary 8.8/10 score given to the original CVE.
Thus after careful review it looks like at this point the best the hacker can do is make you reboot or hang your system. And after your system ‘hangs’ or stops working then a reboot will be necessary. If the attack is good enough it will make you reboot on its own. Thus it means that the attackers are still working on this attack angle, so far at best it will be an annoyance.
Problem is that this is an ever changing environment and could be problematic in the future.
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