Medium severity · published Jul 29, 2026
CVE-2026-56390
Arbitrary Output Location Change in GNU Bison
6.3
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
GNU Bison improperly handles grammar‑defined output paths. Grammar directives such as %output and %header allow specifying file paths, which are accepted without restriction and override caller‑supplied output options.
When processing attacker-supplied grammar, this behavior allows directing generated files to arbitrary writable locations on the filesystem, potentially overwriting existing files accessible to the Bison process.
Maintainers of this project were notified about this vulnerability, and fixed the issue in commit 8d101c19d4d9aaedf83a448c925513742d4efcf0. 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:N/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Changed
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 7% 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
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-56390
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-56390
Third Party Advisory
https://cert.pl/en/posts/2026/07/CVE-2026-56389
Product
https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bison.git/
Patch
https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bison.git/commit/?id=8d101c19d4d9aaedf83a448c925513742d4efcf0
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GNU Bison before 3.7.1 has a use-after-free in _obstack_free in lib/obstack.c (called from gram_lex) when a '\0' byte is encountered
5.5
CVE-2020-14150
GNU Bison before 3.5.4 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash)
