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CVE PROGRAM SOURCE RECORD4.6 Medium

CVE-2026-56288

NULL Pointer Dereference in GNU patch

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

Affected products

Version statuses are supplied by the assigning organization. Consult the original record for detailed ranges and platform conditions.

GNU patch

Default version status: unaffected

  • 0 to ≤ 2.8.0affected

References