CVE-2026-6791

Publication date 10 August 2026

Last updated 14 August 2026


Ubuntu priority

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.

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
glibc 26.04 LTS resolute
Needs evaluation
24.04 LTS noble
Needs evaluation
22.04 LTS jammy
Needs evaluation
20.04 LTS focal
Needs evaluation
18.04 LTS bionic
Needs evaluation
16.04 LTS xenial
Needs evaluation
eglibc 26.04 LTS resolute Not in release
24.04 LTS noble Not in release
22.04 LTS jammy Not in release
14.04 LTS trusty
Needs evaluation

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v4.0

Base score 6.6 · Medium

Vector: CVSS: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:U


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