What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2015-8386

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 6.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2015-12-02 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

PCRE before 8.38 mishandles the interaction of lookbehind assertions and mutually recursive subpatterns, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (buffer overflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror.

Affected products

• Fedoraproject Fedora: 22
• Oracle Corporation Oracle Linux: 7
• PCRE Perl Compatible Regular Expression Library: through 8.37
• PHP: from 5.5.0 before 5.5.32; from 5.6.0 before 5.6.18; from 7.0.0 before 7.0.3 — fixed in 5.5.32, 5.6.18, 7.0.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PHP 5.5.32, 5.6.18, 7.0.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2016-January/174931.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-1025.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-2750.html
• http://vcs.pcre.org/pcre/code/trunk/ChangeLog?view=markup
• http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg3T1023886
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/11/29/1
• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/linuxbulletinapr2016-2952096.html
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/82990
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016:1132
• https://bto.bluecoat.com/security-advisory/sa128
• https://h20566.www2.hpe.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/kb/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c05240731
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201607-02

Get alerted when CVE-2015-8386 or the next vulnerability affects your stack