CVE-2026-18839
LowCVSS 2.2Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk0th percentile - higher than 0% of all known CVEs
Summary
An integer underflow was found in the popt library when formatting help text for option tables wider than the terminal width. A local user who can cause an application to print help under those conditions may cause the application to crash or fail to display help, resulting in a denial of service.
Risk Assessment
An attacker with local access could disrupt applications using the popt library, causing crashes or unavailability of help functionality.
Recommendation
Update the popt library to a patched version and restrict the ability to invoke applications with very wide command-line options.
Other vulnerabilities in popt
See all- CVE-2026-18743Low
Vulnerability in the popt library allows an attacker to provide specially crafted configuration content that, when loaded, can lead to a small memory corruption issue due to an error in how the poptConfigFileToString function reallocates memory for buffers.
- CVE-2026-18739Low
A flaw was found in popt, a command-line option parsing library. An off-by-one error in the poptStuffArgs function, when repeatedly called by a host application or through deep alias nesting, can lead to corruption of internal program data. This corruption could potentially enable a local attacker to execute arbitrary code if the host application then unsafely processes the altered data.
Original NVD description (English source)
An integer underflow was found in the popt library when formatting help text for option tables that exceed the terminal width. A local user who can cause an application to print help under those conditions may cause that application to crash or fail to display help, resulting in a denial of service of the affected application.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS