What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-3191

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 8.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2016-03-17 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

The compile_branch function in pcre_compile.c in PCRE 8.x before 8.39 and pcre2_compile.c in PCRE2 before 10.22 mishandles patterns containing an (*ACCEPT) substring in conjunction with nested parentheses, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (stack-based buffer overflow) via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror, aka ZDI-CAN-3542.

Affected products

• Pcre: 8.00, 8.01, 8.02, 8.10, 8.11, 8.12 (+12)
• PCRE2: through 10.21

References

• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-1025.html
• http://vcs.pcre.org/pcre2?view=revision&revision=489
• http://vcs.pcre.org/pcre?view=revision&revision=1631
• http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg3T1023886
• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/linuxbulletinapr2016-2952096.html
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/84810
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016:1132
• https://bto.bluecoat.com/security-advisory/sa128
• https://bugs.debian.org/815920
• https://bugs.debian.org/815921
• https://bugs.exim.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1311503

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