CVE-2026-93990 PUBLISHED

Expat through 2.8.4 Malformed UTF-16 Acceptance via Unchecked Surrogate

Assigner: VulnCheck
Reserved: 19.09.2026 Published: 19.09.2026 Updated: 19.09.2026

Expat through 2.8.4 fails to validate low surrogates following high surrogates in UTF-16 input, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can craft UTF-16 encoded XML with lone high surrogates that consume following code units, hiding markup characters from the parser and enabling XML injection attacks.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.7

Product Status

Vendor libexpat
Product libexpat
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 2.8.4 (incl.)

Credits

  • Kartik Kenchi (netliomax25-code) finder

References

Problem Types

  • Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding CWE