CVE-2017-20205 CRITICAL

CVE-2017-20205: Valve Source SDK Stack-Based Buffer Overflow RCE

Vendor Valve Software
Product Source SDK (source-sdk-2013)
Weakness CWE-121
Published October 15, 2025
Last update November 21, 2025

CVSS base score

9.2/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Confidentiality
Integrity

CVSS vector

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

October 15, 2025 CVE published
November 21, 2025 Record updated