CVE-2026-6791

Potential stack-based buffer clash during tilde expansion in wordexp

State
Published
Severity
6.6 Medium
Published
Aug 10, 2026
Updated
Aug 12, 2026
Reserved
Apr 21, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

When expanding paths that begin with a tilde (~) followed by a username, the internal parse_tilde function extracts the username to determine the user's home directory. The implementation allocates memory for this username directly on the stack using the strndupa macro. Because the size of this allocation was determined by the length of the user-supplied input without any bounds checks, passing an excessively long username e.g. thousands of characters, forces the thread to exhaust its stack space. Thus if an application passes untrusted, attacker-controlled input to the wordexp function, an attacker can trigger a stack clash.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.06.6 MediumCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:L/VA:H/SC:N/SI:L/SA:H/E:Uglibc

Weaknesses

  • CWE-121 Stack-based buffer overflow

Affected Products

ProductVersions
glibcThe GNU C Library
  • 2.0 through 2.43Affected

References

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