CVE-2026-56392 PUBLISHED

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in GNU coreutils

Assigner: CERT-PL
Reserved: 21.06.2026 Published: 24.07.2026 Updated: 24.07.2026

GNU coreutils unexpand is vulnerable to a heap-based buffer overflow due to an integer overflow during buffer allocation when processing large tab stop (-t) values. The multiplication used to calculate the allocation size can wrap around, resulting in an undersized buffer. When processing crafted input, subsequent writes exceed the allocated memory, leading to an out‑of‑bounds heap write.

When running GNU coreutils unexpand with attacker-provided large tab stop (-t) arguments, this behavior leads to a crash and potentially achieve a heap write primitive depending on memory layout.

This issue has been fixed in the commit b60a159fdc5bfcf9988d3a4cb6f53abe8ad5d35d

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:L/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 1.8

Product Status

Vendor GNU
Product coreutils
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 9.11 (incl.)

Credits

  • Michał Majchrowicz (AFINE Team) finder
  • Marcin Wyczechowski (AFINE Team) finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-122 Heap-based Buffer Overflow CWE