Administrators at a financial institution have noticed that its transaction processing application terminates unexpectedly whenever excessively long strings of characters are entered into the input fields. Which vulnerability might be the most likely cause of this application behavior?
The described scenario suggests that the application is experiencing a Buffer Overflow vulnerability. Buffer overflow happens when a program attempts to write more data to a fixed-length block of memory, or buffer, than it is allocated to hold. Since the application is crashing when processing long strings, it is likely that the allocated memory for the input data is being exceeded, causing the application to terminate unexpectedly. SQL Injection vulnerabilities are exploited by entering malicious SQL statements into input fields, aiming to manipulate the back-end database, which is not related to the length of input causing crashes. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities exploit the way browsers parse HTML and JavaScript but would not cause the application to terminate in the described manner. Directory Traversal attacks aim at accessing files and directories that are stored outside the web root folder, and although they are serious, they do not fit the symptoms described.
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