CVE-2017-20205 - CVE House
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Status published Critical CVE-2017-20205

Valve Source SDK Stack-Based Buffer Overflow RCE

Vulnerability Description

Valve's Source SDK (source-sdk-2013)'s ragdoll model parsing logic contains a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability.The tokenizer function `nexttoken` copies characters from an input string into a fixed-size stack buffer without performing bounds checks. When `ParseKeyValue` processes a collisionpair rule longer than the destination buffer (256 bytes), an overflow of the stack buffer `szToken` can occur and overwrite the function return address. A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerable code by supplying a specially crafted ragdoll model which causes the oversized collisionpair rule to be parsed, resulting in remote code execution on affected clients or servers. Valve has addressed this issue in many of their Source games, but independently-developed games must manually apply patch.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

The following person or organization is credited with identifying this vulnerability, as recorded in the NVD database:

  • One Up Security, LLC

Affected Vendor

Valve Software

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Affected Software

Source SDK (source-sdk-2013)
Vulnerable Versions:
source-sdk-2013

Timeline

Official Publish: October 15th, 2025
Last Modified: November 21st, 2025
Added to House: July 20th, 2026

CVSS Vectors

Weaknesses (CWE)