procps-ng before version 3.3.15 is vulnerable to a denial of service in ps via mmap buffer overflow. Inbuilt protection in ps maps a guard page at the end of the overflowed buffer, ensuring that the impact of this flaw is limited to a crash (temporary denial of service).
A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().
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.