CVE-2026-56288

Name	CVE-2026-56288
Description	GNU patch is vulnerable to a NULL pointer dereference when processing a specially crafted unified-diff patch file. Improper handling of consecutive end-of-file newline markers can corrupt internal hunk (single block of changes in diff) data structures, causing the application to pass a NULL pointer to fwrite() during patch processing. An attacker can trigger this condition with a malicious patch file, causing the utility to crash and resulting in a denial of service. This issue has been fixed in the commit e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313
Source	CVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source Package	Release	Version	Status
patch (PTS)	bookworm, bullseye	2.7.6-7	vulnerable
	forky, sid, trixie	2.8-2	vulnerable

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

Package	Type	Release	Fixed Version	Urgency	Origin	Debian Bugs
patch	source	(unstable)	(unfixed)	unimportant

Notes

https://cert.pl/en/posts/2026/07/CVE-2026-56288/
https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/commit/?id=e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313
Crash in CLI tool, no security impact