fold_binary in fold-const.c in GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) 4.1 improperly handles pointer overflow when folding a certain expr comparison to a corresponding offset comparison in cases other than EQ_EXPR and NE_EXPR, which might introduce buffer overflow vulnerabilities into applications that could be exploited by context-dependent attackers.NOTE: the vendor states that the essence of the issue is "not correctly interpreting an offset to a pointer as a signed value."
The product performs operations on a memory buffer, but it reads from or writes to a memory location outside the buffer's intended boundary. This may result in read or write operations on unexpected memory locations that could be linked to other variables, data structures, or internal program data.