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CVE PROGRAM SOURCE RECORD6.6 Medium

CVE-2026-6791

Potential stack-based buffer clash during tilde expansion in wordexp

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.

Affected products

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

The GNU C Library glibc

Default version status: unaffected

  • 2.0 to ≤ 2.43affected

References