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Potential buffer under-read in ungetwc

The GNU C Library glibc · CVE-2026-5928
0 news outlets0 CERTs and agencies0 researchers

Assessment: Track

SSVC decision points: exploitation poc, automatable yes, technical impact partial, deployment low.

What is it?

Calling the ungetwc function on a FILE stream with wide characters encoded in a character set that has overlaps between its single byte and multi-byte character encodings, in the GNU C Library version 2.43 or earlier, may result in an attempt to read bytes before an allocated buffer, potentially resulting in unintentional disclosure of neighboring data in the heap, or a program crash. A bug in the wide character pushback implementation (_IO_wdefault_pbackfail in libio/wgenops.c) causes ungetwc() to operate on the regular character buffer (fp->_IO_read_ptr) instead of the actual wide-stream read pointer (fp->_wide_data->_IO_read_ptr). The program crash may happen in cases where fp->_IO_read_ptr is not initialized and hence points to NULL. The buffer under-read requires a special situation where the input character encoding is such that there are overlaps between single byte representations and multibyte representations in that encoding, resulting in spurious matches. The spurious match case is not possible in the standard Unicode character sets.

Evidence

No coverage recorded yet.

Exploitation

  • Public proof of concept
  • Exploited in the wild
  • Listed as known exploited
CVSS
7.5
EPSS
0.5%
First seen
10 h ago
Status
corroborated

All The GNU C Library vulnerabilities