CVE-2026-35378

uutils coreutils expr Local Denial of Service via Eager Evaluation of Parenthesized Subexpressions

State
Published
Severity
3.3 Low
Published
Apr 22, 2026
Updated
Apr 22, 2026
Reserved
Apr 2, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

A logic error in the expr utility of uutils coreutils causes the program to evaluate parenthesized subexpressions during the parsing phase rather than at the execution phase. This implementation flaw prevents the utility from performing proper short-circuiting for logical OR (|) and AND (&) operations. As a result, arithmetic errors (such as division by zero) occurring within "dead" branches, branches that should be ignored due to short-circuiting, are raised as fatal errors. This divergence from GNU expr behavior can cause guarded expressions within shell scripts to fail with hard errors instead of returning expected boolean results, leading to premature script termination and breaking GNU-compatible shell control flow.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.13.3 LowCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:Lcanonical

Weaknesses

  • CWE-768 Incorrect Short Circuit Evaluation

Affected Products

ProductVersions
coreutilsUutils
  • before 0.8.0Affected

References

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