// For flags

CVE-2026-5928

Potential buffer under-read in ungetwc

Severity Score

7.5
*CVSS v3.1

Exploit Likelihood

*EPSS

Affected Versions

*CPE

Public Exploits

1
*Multiple Sources

Exploited in Wild

-
*KEV

Decision

Attend
*SSVC
Descriptions

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.

*Credits: Rocket Ma
CVSS Scores
Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
* Common Vulnerability Scoring System
SSVC
  • Decision:Attend
Exploitation
Poc
Automatable
Yes
Tech. Impact
Partial
* Organization's Worst-case Scenario
Timeline
  • 2026-04-08 CVE Reserved
  • 2026-04-20 CVE Published
  • 2026-04-26 EPSS Updated
  • 2026-04-30 CVE Updated
  • 2026-04-30 First Exploit
  • ---------- Exploited in Wild
  • ---------- KEV Due Date
CWE
  • CWE-127: Buffer Under-read
CAPEC
  • CAPEC-267: Leverage Alternate Encoding
  • CAPEC-540: Overread Buffers
References (1)
Affected Vendors, Products, and Versions
Vendor Product Version Other Status
Vendor Product Version Other Status <-- --> Vendor Product Version Other Status
Gnu
Search vendor "Gnu"
Glibc
Search vendor "Gnu" for product "Glibc"
<= 2.43
Search vendor "Gnu" for product "Glibc" and version " <= 2.43"
-
Affected