What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-14040: golang.org/x/text Infinite loop

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-06-17 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-835

Description

The x/text package before 0.3.3 for Go has a vulnerability in encoding/unicode that could lead to the UTF-16 decoder entering an infinite loop, causing the program to crash or run out of memory. An attacker could provide a single byte to a UTF16 decoder instantiated with UseBOM or ExpectBOM to trigger an infinite loop if the String function on the Decoder is called, or the Decoder is passed to golang.org/x/text/transform.String.

Affected products

• Fedoraproject Fedora: 32
• golang.org/x/text/language: before 0.3.3 — fixed in 0.3.3
• Golang.Org/X/Text: before 0.3.3 — fixed in 0.3.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: golang.org/x/text/language 0.3.3; Golang.Org/X/Text 0.3.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/golang-announce/bXVeAmGOqz0
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/TACQFZDPA7AUR6TRZBCX2RGRFSDYLI7O/
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/golang-announce/bXVeAmGOqz0
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/TACQFZDPA7AUR6TRZBCX2RGRFSDYLI7O/

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