CVE-2026-54559
Received
Received - Intake
Buffer Overflow in PocketSphinx Speech Recognition
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-54559, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-09-14
Last updated on: 2026-09-14
Assigner: GitHub, Inc.
Description
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.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| cmusphinx | pocketsphinx | 5.1.1 |
| cmusphinx | pocketsphinx | to 5.1.1 (exc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-121 | A stack-based buffer overflow condition is a condition where the buffer being overwritten is allocated on the stack (i.e., is a local variable or, rarely, a parameter to a function). |
| CWE-119 | The product performs operations on a memory buffer, but it reads from or writes to a memory location outside the buffer's intended boundary. This may result in read or write operations on unexpected memory locations that could be linked to other variables, data structures, or internal program data. |
| CWE-122 | A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc(). |
