CVE-2026-56288
Received
Received - Intake
NULL Pointer Dereference in GNU patch via Malformed Unified Diff
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-56288, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-07-09
Last updated on: 2026-07-09
Assigner: CERT.PL
Description
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
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| gnu | patch | * |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-476 | The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL. |
