CVE-2026-56288

NULL Pointer Dereference in GNU patch

State
Published
Severity
4.6 Medium
Published
Jul 9, 2026
Updated
Jul 9, 2026
Reserved
Jun 20, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

GNU patch is vulnerable to a NULL pointer dereference when processing a specially crafted unified-diff patch file. Improper handling of consecutive end-of-file newline markers can corrupt internal hunk (single block of changes in diff) data structures, causing the application to pass a NULL pointer to fwrite() during patch processing. An attacker can trigger this condition with a malicious patch file, causing the utility to crash and resulting in a denial of service.

This issue has been fixed in the commit e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.04.6 MediumCVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NCERT-PL

Weaknesses

Affected Products

ProductVersions
patchGNU
  • 2.8.0 and earlierAffected

References

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