CVE-2018-6551

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-02-02 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-190

Description

The malloc implementation in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6), from version 2.24 to 2.26 on powerpc, and only in version 2.26 on i386, did not properly handle malloc calls with arguments close to SIZE_MAX and could return a pointer to a heap region that is smaller than requested, eventually leading to heap corruption.

Affected products

GNU C Library (glibc): from 2.24 through 2.26

References

https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190404-0003/
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22774
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=8e448310d74b283c5cd02b9ed7fb997b47bf9b22
https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190404-0003/
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22774
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=8e448310d74b283c5cd02b9ed7fb997b47bf9b22

Get alerted when CVE-2018-6551 or the next vulnerability affects your stack