CVE-2026-73857
Received
Received - Intake
ModSecurity Memory Corruption via Uninitialized Pointer in XML Parsing
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-73857, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-11-09
Last updated on: 2026-11-09
Assigner: GitHub, Inc.
Description
Description
ModSecurity is an open source, cross platform web application firewall (WAF) engine for Apache, IIS and Nginx. From 3.0.15 until 3.0.17, XML request body processing with SecParseXmlIntoArgs set to On or OnlyArgs can leave XMLNodes::parsing_ctx_arg uninitialized in the SAX end-element callback. A single crafted unauthenticated HTTP request can make a worker dereference the pointer, resulting in a constant-value write to an attacker-controlled address. The resulting memory corruption can terminate the worker and may disclose memory or redirect execution. Earlier 3.0.x releases and ModSecurity 2.x do not use the affected path. This issue is fixed in version 3.0.17.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
Currently, no data is known.
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-787 | The product writes data past the end, or before the beginning, of the intended buffer. |
| CWE-824 | The product accesses or uses a pointer that has not been initialized. |
