CVE-2026-53910

NameCVE-2026-53910
Descriptiondiff3 tool from GNU diffutils is vulnerable to a heap‑based buffer overflow due to multiple signed integer overflows in line‑mapping calculations. Incorrect arithmetic in mapping line ranges can result in corrupted values being used for memory allocation and loop bounds. When processing crafted diff output, these overflows may cause the application to allocate insufficient memory and subsequently perform out‑of‑bounds writes during internal processing.  An attacker who can control the output of the diff program used by diff3 (e.g. via --diff-program pointing to a malicious script) can trigger out-of-bounds writes, resulting in a crash and potentially remote code execution depending on the environment. This issue has been fixed in commit 9ff04d5b84743e331e80b589335a52c5480d1815  NOTE: The project maintainers claim that this is not a security issue. They state that the worst outcome this issue can cause is a crash of diff and that it cannot be used to escalate privileges.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)
Debian Bugs1142675

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
diffutils (PTS)bullseye1:3.7-5vulnerable
bookworm1:3.8-4vulnerable
trixie1:3.10-4vulnerable
forky, sid1:3.12-1vulnerable

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
diffutilssource(unstable)(unfixed)unimportant1142675

Notes

Fixed by: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/diffutils.git/commit/?id=73ed7ce85cc78effb94daf028c9af6b4e5252e50
Fixed by: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/diffutils.git/commit/?id=9ff04d5b84743e331e80b589335a52c5480d1815
Negligible security impact.

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