What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-15858

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-08-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

Unchecked NULL pointer usage when handling invalid aliases in CopyKeyAliasesToKeymap in xkbcomp/keycodes.c in xkbcommon before 0.8.1 could be used by local attackers to crash (NULL pointer dereference) the xkbcommon parser by supplying a crafted keymap file.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04, 18.04
• Xkbcommon Libxkbcommon: before 0.8.1 — fixed in 0.8.1
• Xkbcommon: before 0.8.1 — fixed in 0.8.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Xkbcommon Libxkbcommon 0.8.1; Xkbcommon 0.8.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/commit/badb428e63387140720f22486b3acbd3d738859f
• https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2018-August/039232.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-05
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3786-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3786-2/
• https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/commit/badb428e63387140720f22486b3acbd3d738859f
• https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2018-August/039232.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-05
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3786-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3786-2/

Get alerted when CVE-2018-15858 or the next vulnerability affects your stack