libgit2 is a portable C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a linkable library with a solid API, allowing to build Git functionality into your application. Using well-crafted inputs to `git_index_add` can cause heap corruption that could be leveraged for arbitrary code execution. There is an issue in the `has_dir_name` function in `src/libgit2/index.c`, which frees an entry that should not be freed. The freed entry is later used and overwritten with potentially bad actor-controlled data leading to controlled heap corruption. Depending on the application that uses libgit2, this could lead to arbitrary code execution. This issue has been patched in version 1.6.5 and 1.7.2.
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.