What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-18397

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• 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: 2019-11-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-120

Description

A buffer overflow in the fribidi_get_par_embedding_levels_ex() function in lib/fribidi-bidi.c of GNU FriBidi through 1.0.7 allows an attacker to cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code by delivering crafted text content to a user, when this content is then rendered by an application that uses FriBidi for text layout calculations. Examples include any GNOME or GTK+ based application that uses Pango for text layout, as this internally uses FriBidi for bidirectional text layout. For example, the attacker can construct a crafted text file to be opened in GEdit, or a crafted IRC message to be viewed in HexChat.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 10.0, 8.0, 9.0
• GNU Fribidi: from 1.0.0 through 1.0.7

References

• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:4326
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:4361
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0291
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=944327
• https://github.com/fribidi/fribidi/commit/034c6e9a1d296286305f4cfd1e0072b879f52568
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/TFS3N6KKXPI6ATDNEUFRSLX7R6BOBNIP/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/W5UJRTG32FDNI7T637Q6PZYL3UCRR5HR/
• https://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=157322128105807&w=2
• https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2019-18397
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-41
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:4326
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:4361

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