Medium severity · published Jul 24, 2026
CVE-2026-56391
Out‑of‑bounds Read in GNU coreutils
6.1
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
GNU coreutils uniq is vulnerable to an out‑of‑bounds read due to incorrect handling of multibyte input when the -w (--check-chars) option is used. The find_field() function miscalculates the byte length of characters by repeatedly processing a fixed pointer instead of advancing through the input, resulting in an inflated length value. This incorrect length is later used in a memcmp operation, causing reads beyond the allocated buffer when processing crafted multibyte input. When running GNU coreutils uniq with attacker-provided arguments, this behavior leads to a crash and potential adjacent heap memory exposure. This issue has been fixed in the commit d64e35a8a4c0e4608321433e0d84d917e4e36371.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 3% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
CO
coreutils · GNU
9.5 through 9.11 · source: vendor, NVD
Affected product
CO
coreutils
GNU
More from coreutils
9.8
CVE-2015-4042
Integer overflow in the keycompare_mb function in sort.c in sort in GNU Coreutils through 8.23 might allow attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly…
7.8
CVE-2015-4041
The keycompare_mb function in sort.c in sort in GNU Coreutils through 8.23 on 64-bit platforms performs a size calculation without considering the number of bytes occupied by…
7.1
CVE-2017-18018
In GNU Coreutils through 8.29, chown-core.c in chown and chgrp does not prevent replacement of a plain file with a symlink during use of the POSIX "-R -L" options, which allows…
6.1
CVE-2026-56392
Heap-based Buffer Overflow in GNU coreutils
5.5
CVE-2024-0684
Coreutils: heap overflow in split --line-bytes with very long lines