Critical SQLite Flaw Leaves Millions of Apps Vulnerable to Hackers

Ganesh The Awesome Senior Pre & Post-Sales Engineer at GlobalDots

17th December, 2018 1 Min read

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical vulnerability in widely used SQLite database software that exposes billions of deployments to hackers.

Dubbed as ‘Magellan’ by Tencent’s Blade security team, the newly discovered SQLite flaw could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary or malicious code on affected devices, leak program memory or crash applications.

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SQLite is a lightweight, widely used disk-based relational database management system that requires minimal support from operating systems or external libraries, and hence compatible with almost every device, platform, and programming language.

SQLite is the most widely deployed database engine in the world today, which is being used by millions of applications with literally billions of deployments, including IoT devices, macOS and Windows apps, including major web browsers, such as Adobe software, Skype and more.

Since Chromium-based web browsers—including Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave—also support SQLite through the deprecated Web SQL database API, a remote attacker can easily target users of affected browsers just by convincing them into visiting a specially crafted web-page.

A digital representation of green falling characters resembling code from the Matrix.

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