CVE-2026-6238
MediumCVSS 6.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk23th percentile - higher than 23% of all known CVEs
Summary
In the GNU C Library (glibc) versions 2.0.1 through 2.43, a vulnerability exists in the deprecated functions ns_printrrf, ns_printrr, and fp_nquery. These functions fail to validate RDATA content against RDATA length in DNS responses for A6, CERT, LOC, TKEY, or TSIG records, potentially allowing an attacker to craft a DNS response causing application crash or uninitialized memory read.
Risk Assessment
The risk for the organization is the potential for remote application crashes or leakage of uninitialized memory via crafted DNS responses. The vulnerability does not affect the standard DNS resolver but may impact diagnostic tools or legacy applications using these deprecated debugging functions.
Recommendation
Immediately update glibc to version 2.44 or later. Applications using ns_printrrf, ns_printrr, or fp_nquery should migrate to alternative interfaces, as these functions have been deprecated since version 2.34 and may be removed in future releases.
Other vulnerabilities in GNU C Library
See all- CVE-2024-2961High
The iconv() function in the GNU C Library versions 2.39 and older may overflow the output buffer by up to 4 bytes when converting strings to the ISO-2022-CN-EXT character set. This may lead to application crashes or overwrite a neighbouring variable.
- CVE-2025-0395Medium
In GNU C Library versions 2.13 to 2.40, when the assert() function fails, it does not allocate enough space for the assertion failure message string and size information, which may lead to a buffer overflow if the message string size aligns to page size.
- CVE-2025-4802Medium
In GNU C Library versions 2.27 to 2.38, an untrusted LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable vulnerability allows attacker-controlled loading of dynamically shared libraries in statically compiled setuid binaries that call dlopen (including internal dlopen calls after setlocale or calls to NSS functions).
- CVE-2026-5450Critical
Vulnerability in the GNU C Library (glibc) versions 2.7 through 2.43. Calling scanf family functions with %mc (malloc'd character match) and an explicit width greater than 1024 can cause a one-byte heap buffer overflow.
- CVE-2023-4911HighActively exploited
A buffer overflow was discovered in the GNU C Library's dynamic loader ld.so while processing the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. This issue could allow a local attacker to use maliciously crafted GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variables when launching binaries with SUID permission to execute code with elevated privileges.
- CVE-2026-8674Medium
Initializing the DNS stub resolver from /etc/resolv.conf or LOCALDOMAIN with a search list containing a domain of roughly 200 characters or more in GNU C Library versions 2.26 to 2.44 results in an assertion failure that aborts the process. The resolver truncates the search list when copying into the fixed-size _res.defdname buffer, but the consistency check compares against the wrong size and does not handle a first entry that does not fit, causing the assertion to fail.
- CVE-2026-80489Medium
Converting crafted EUC_JISX0213 input to UCS-4 or the internal wide character encoding, for example with iconv, in the GNU C Library version 2.3 to 2.44 may result in the converter making no progress, causing the calling application to hang. Some EUC_JISX0213 sequences decode to two code points. If the output buffer has room for only the first one, the converter stores the second in the conversion state and returns E2BIG, but it never clears that pending character after emitting it on the next call. The converter then keeps emitting the pending character without consuming further input, so an application that retries the conversion loops forever. The input must be attacker controlled and the application must convert it with an output buffer small enough to split the two code points. Only the EUC_JISX0213 character set is affected, which is not commonly used.
- CVE-2026-77117Medium
Converting crafted SHIFT_JISX0213 input to UCS-4 or the internal wide character encoding, for example with iconv, in the GNU C Library version 2.3 to 2.44 may result in the converter making no progress, causing the calling application to hang. Some SHIFT_JISX0213 sequences decode to two code points. If the output buffer has room for only the first one, the converter stores the second in the conversion state and returns E2BIG, but it never clears that pending character after emitting it on the next call. The converter then keeps emitting the pending character without consuming further input, so an application that retries the conversion loops forever. The input must be attacker controlled and the application must convert it with an output buffer small enough to split the two code points. Only the SHIFT_JISX0213 character set is affected, which is not commonly used.
- CVE-2026-19542Medium
In the GNU C Library versions 2.1 to 2.44, calling tdelete on a sufficiently deep tree may write one pointer past the end of an alloca-allocated array on the stack, which may crash the application. The tdelete implementation keeps an explicit stack of parent nodes for rebalancing, which is grown as needed while descending the tree; two rebalancing branches push an additional entry without checking the capacity.
- CVE-2026-19499High
In GNU C Library versions 2.38 to 2.44, calling strfmon or strfmon_l can write past the end of the caller-supplied output buffer when a conversion uses right-justified width padding. Exploitation requires an application code path that calls these functions with right-justified width padding into a destination buffer large enough for the padding but too small for the internal memmove call. At the time of publication, no network-facing application impact is known.
Original NVD description (English source)
The deprecated functions ns_printrrf, ns_printrr and fp_nquery in the GNU C Library version 2.0.1 to version 2.43 fail to validate the RDATA content against the RDATA length in a DNS response when processing A6, CERT, LOC, TKEY or TSIG records, which may allow an attacker to craft a DNS response, causing a target application to crash or read uninitialized memory. These functions are for application debugging only and hence not in the path of code executed by the DNS resolver. Further, they have been deprecated since version 2.34 and should not be used by any new applications. Applications should consider porting away from these interfaces since they may be removed in future versions.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

