What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-56288: NULL Pointer Dereference in GNU patch

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-09 · updated 2026-10-25
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

GNU patch is vulnerable to a NULL pointer dereference when processing a specially crafted unified-diff patch file. Improper handling of consecutive end-of-file newline markers can corrupt internal hunk (single block of changes in diff) data structures, causing the application to pass a NULL pointer to fwrite() during patch processing. An attacker can trigger this condition with a malicious patch file, causing the utility to crash and resulting in a denial of service. This issue has been fixed in the commit e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313

Affected products

• GNU patch: through 2.8.0

References

• https://cert.pl/en/posts/2026/07/CVE-2026-56288
• https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/
• https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/commit/?id=e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313

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