CVE-2026-80431 PUBLISHED

Out-of-bounds write in the kitty text sizing protocol allows termination of the terminal process

Assigner: Secur0
Reserved: 26.08.2026 Published: 25.09.2026 Updated: 25.09.2026

Out-of-bounds Write in the natural width branch of the text sizing protocol in kitty from 0.40.0 before 0.49.0 allows a program writing to the terminal to write past the end of a fixed-size buffer, because screen_handle_multicell_command() in kitty/screen.c appends each codepoint of a grapheme cluster with lc.chars[lc.count++] = ch without any capacity check, while lc is declared by the RAII_ListOfChars macro as a four-element char_type array in the function's stack frame, so an OSC 66 escape code whose payload carries a grapheme cluster longer than four codepoints writes beyond that buffer, one 32-bit value per additional codepoint, in the order the codepoints appear. Where the cluster is preceded in the same payload by a sequence that causes an intermediate flush, the buffer is first migrated to the heap by ensure_space_for_chars() and the write occurs past the heap allocation instead. This results in termination of the kitty process and therefore of all its windows, tabs and child processes.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 6.8

Product Status

Vendor Kovid Goyal
Product kitty
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0.40.0 to 0.49.0 (excl.)

Solutions

Upgrade to kitty 0.49.0 or later.

Credits

  • C4sh3R finder
  • Cristian Fernández Cornejo analyst
  • Xoán M. Otero Jorge analyst
  • Secur0 CNA coordinator
  • Kovid Goyal remediation developer

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-787 Out-of-bounds Write CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-100 Overflow Buffers