What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-54559: PocketSphinx: Buffer overflows in language and acoustic model loading code

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.9 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-14 · updated 2026-09-30
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

PocketSphinx is a small speech recognizer. Prior to 5.1.1, the trie language-model loaders in src/lm/ngram_model_trie.c do not adequately validate boundary conditions in ARPA, DMP, and binary format headers, and the acoustic-model loaders in src/mdef.c and src/util/bio.c use sscanf with unbounded string fields. Loading an invalid, corrupted, or malicious language or acoustic model can therefore cause stack or heap buffer overflows and memory corruption. An attacker who can write to a directory selected by POCKETSPHINX_PATH can replace or add a model file that PocketSphinx later loads; users of PocketSphinx 5prealpha have no backported patch and must migrate to the fixed release. This issue is fixed in version 5.1.1.

Affected products

• cmusphinx pocketsphinx: before 5.1.1

References

• https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx/commit/2a3c03788a9973eff548664334fb781e9f4ad4a5
• https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx/releases/tag/v5.1.1
• https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx/security/advisories/GHSA-56r5-2p2f-7cxp

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