CVE-2019-14877

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2020-03-19 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

In the __mdiff function of the newlib libc library, all versions prior to 3.3.0 (see newlib/libc/stdlib/mprec.c), Balloc is used to allocate big integers, however no check is performed to verify if the allocation succeeded or not. The access to _wds and _sign will trigger a null pointer dereference bug in case of a memory allocation failure.

Affected products

Red Hat newlib: before 3.3.0 — fixed in 3.3.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Red Hat newlib 3.3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://census-labs.com/news/2020/01/31/multiple-null-pointer-dereference-vulnerabilities-in-newlib/
https://census-labs.com/news/2020/01/31/multiple-null-pointer-dereference-vulnerabilities-in-newlib/

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