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CVE-2026-5745: Libarchive: a null pointer dereference vulnerability exists in the acl parser of libarchive

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-04-07 · updated 2026-10-26
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

A flaw was found in libarchive. A NULL pointer dereference vulnerability exists in the ACL parsing logic, specifically within the archive_acl_from_text_nl() function. When processing a malformed ACL string (such as a bare "d" or "default" tag without subsequent fields), the function fails to perform adequate validation before advancing the pointer. An attacker can exploit this by providing a maliciously crafted archive, causing an application utilizing the libarchive API (such as bsdtar) to crash, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS).

Affected products

• libarchive: all versions
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
• RedHat Hardened Images: all versions
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 4.0

References

• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:8944
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-5745
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2455921

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