CVE-2019-20433

Publication date 27 January 2020

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

libaspell.a in GNU Aspell before 0.60.8 has a buffer over-read for a string ending with a single '\0' byte, if the encoding is set to ucs-2 or ucs-4 outside of the application, as demonstrated by the ASPELL_CONF environment variable.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
aspell	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.10 kinetic	Not affected
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not affected
	21.10 impish	Not affected
	21.04 hirsute	Not affected
	20.10 groovy	Not affected
	20.04 LTS focal	Not affected
	19.10 eoan	Not affected
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable
	16.04 LTS xenial	Ignored proposed fix would break other applications
	14.04 LTS trusty	Vulnerable

Notes

leosilva

the fix proposed can potentially break applications that depends on it.

mdeslaur

need to regenerate files after applying patch, see debian bug.

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
aspell	Upstream: de29341 Upstream: cefd447

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	9.1 · Critical
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H