High severity · published Jul 29, 2026
CVE-2026-56389
Arbitrary Command Execution in GNU Bison
8.6
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
GNU Bison allows for an execution of an arbitrary program during HTML report generation due to improper handling of grammar-defined configuration variables. A grammar file can override the executable used for the XML‑to‑HTML transformation step via %define tool.xsltproc, which is accepted without restriction and passed directly to execvp(). When running bison --html on a attacker-provided grammar, this behavior allows execution of an arbitrary program with the privileges of the Bison process. Maintainers of this project were notified about this vulnerability, and fixed the issue in commit 3169c1e7a2c6acc4c59dfcf8b089896d6881925b. However, they did not provide vulnerable version range. Version 3.8.2 was tested and confirmed as vulnerable, other versions were not tested but might also be vulnerable.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High
Scope
Changed
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
BI
Bison · GNU
3.8.2 · source: vendor, NVD
Affected product
BI
Bison
GNU
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5.5
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