High severity · published Apr 20, 2026
CVE-2026-5928
Potential buffer under-read in ungetwc
7.5
CVSS
0.4%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Calling the ungetwc function on a FILE stream with wide characters encoded in a character set that has overlaps between its single byte and multi-byte character encodings, in the GNU C Library version 2.43 or earlier, may result in an attempt to read bytes before an allocated buffer, potentially resulting in unintentional disclosure of neighboring data in the heap, or a program crash. A bug in the wide character pushback implementation (_IO_wdefault_pbackfail in libio/wgenops.c) causes ungetwc() to operate on the regular character buffer (fp->_IO_read_ptr) instead of the actual wide-stream read pointer (fp->_wide_data->_IO_read_ptr). The program crash may happen in cases where fp->_IO_read_ptr is not initialized and hence points to NULL. The buffer under-read requires a special situation where the input character encoding is such that there are overlaps between single byte representations and multibyte representations in that encoding, resulting in spurious matches. The spurious match case is not possible in the standard Unicode character sets.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.4% · higher than 31% 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
2.1.1-89 through 2.43 · source: vendor, NVD
SS
SIMATIC S7-1500 CPU 1518-4 PN/DP MFP · Siemens
V3.1.5 before V3.1.6; V3.1.5 before V3.1.6 · source: CISA
SS
SIMATIC S7-1500 CPU 1518F-4 PN/DP MFP · Siemens
V3.1.5 before V3.1.6; V3.1.5 before V3.1.6 · source: CISA
SS
SIPLUS S7-1500 CPU 1518-4 PN/DP MFP · Siemens
V3.1.5 before V3.1.6 · source: CISA
Affected product
GL
glibc
The GNU C Library
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