CVE-2026-6791 PUBLISHED

Potential stack-based buffer clash during tilde expansion in wordexp

Assigner: glibc
Reserved: 21.04.2026 Published: 10.08.2026 Updated: 10.08.2026

When expanding paths that begin with a tilde (~) followed by a username, the internal parse_tilde function extracts the username to determine the user's home directory. The implementation allocates memory for this username directly on the stack using the strndupa macro. Because the size of this allocation was determined by the length of the user-supplied input without any bounds checks, passing an excessively long username e.g. thousands of characters, forces the thread to exhaust its stack space. Thus if an application passes untrusted, attacker-controlled input to the wordexp function, an attacker can trigger a stack clash.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:L/VA:H/SC:N/SI:L/SA:H/E:U
CVSS Score: 6.6

Product Status

Vendor The GNU C Library
Product glibc
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2.0 to 2.43 (incl.)

Credits

  • storm / 고준용 <rhwnsdyd1112@gmail.com> finder

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-121 Stack-based buffer overflow CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation