What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-4156: Heap out of bound read in builtin.c

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v3.1)
• 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: yes
• Published: 2023-09-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-125

Description

A heap out-of-bounds read flaw was found in builtin.c in the gawk package. This issue may lead to a crash and could be used to read sensitive information.

Affected products

• Fedoraproject Fedora: 38
• GNU Gawk: before 5.1.1 — fixed in 5.1.1
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: GNU Gawk 5.1.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-4156
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2215930
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-4156
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2215930

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