Stack-based Buffer Overflow Affecting biosig package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
low

Based on Debian security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.1% (28th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-DEBIAN12-BIOSIG-12194929
  • published26 Aug 2025
  • disclosed25 Aug 2025

Introduced: 25 Aug 2025

CVE-2025-54481  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-121  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for Debian:12 biosig.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream biosig package and not the biosig package as distributed by Debian. See How to fix? for Debian:12 relevant fixed versions and status.

A stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the MFER parsing functionality of The Biosig Project libbiosig 3.9.0 and Master Branch (35a819fa). A specially crafted MFER file can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker can provide a malicious file to trigger this vulnerability.This vulnerability manifests on line 8744 of biosig.c on the current master branch (35a819fa), when the Tag is 3:

            else if (tag==3) {
                // character code
                char v[17];		// [1]
                if (len>16) fprintf(stderr,"Warning MFER tag2 incorrect length %i>16\n",len);
                curPos += ifread(&v,1,len,hdr);
                v[len]  = 0;

In this case, the overflowed buffer is the newly-declared v [1] instead of buf. Since v is only 17 bytes large, much smaller values of len (even those encoded using a single octet) can trigger an overflow in this code path.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1