Medium severity · published Sep 14, 2026
CVE-2026-19542
Stack-based out-of-bounds write in tdelete during tree rebalancing
5.6
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Calling tdelete on a sufficiently deep tree in the GNU C Library version 2.1 to 2.44 may write one pointer past the end of an alloca-allocated array on the stack, which may crash the application.
The tdelete implementation keeps an explicit stack of parent nodes for rebalancing, which is grown as needed while descending the tree. Two rebalancing branches push an additional entry without checking the capacity, and write past the array when the stack is exactly full. Triggering this requires a node at a depth of exactly 40 (or 40 plus a multiple of 20), which implies a tree with at least a million nodes, so an attacker must drive a large number of insertions and deletions through an application that uses tsearch and tdelete. The written value is a pointer into a tree node and is not directly attacker controlled. No affected application in common distributions has been identified.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
High
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
Low
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 13% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
GL
glibc · The GNU C Library
2.1 through 2.44 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-19542
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-19542
sourceware.org
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=34506
sourceware.org
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob_plain;f=advisories/GLIBC-SA-2026-0018
More from glibc
9.8
CVE-2026-5450
scanf %mc off-by-one heap buffer overflow
8.4
CVE-2026-0861
Integer overflow in memalign leads to heap corruption
8.1
CVE-2024-33599
nscd: Stack-based buffer overflow in netgroup cache
7.7
CVE-2026-19499
Buffer overflow in strfmon and strfmon_l right-justification padding
7.5
CVE-2026-5928
Potential buffer under-read in ungetwc
