Calling the ungetwc function on a FILE stream with wide characters encoded in a character set that has overlaps between its single byte and multi-byte character encodings, in the GNU C Library version 2.43 or earlier, may result in an attempt to read bytes before an allocated buffer, potentially resulting in unintentional disclosure of neighboring data in the heap, or a program crash.

A bug in the wide character pushback implementation (_IO_wdefault_pbackfail in libio/wgenops.c) causes ungetwc() to operate on the regular character buffer (fp->_IO_read_ptr) instead of the actual wide-stream read pointer (fp->_wide_data->_IO_read_ptr). The program crash may happen in cases where fp->_IO_read_ptr is not initialized and hence points to NULL. The buffer under-read requires a special situation where the input character encoding is such that there are overlaps between single byte representations and multibyte representations in that encoding, resulting in spurious matches. The spurious match case is not possible in the standard Unicode character sets.

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Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared The Gnu C Library
The Gnu C Library glibc
Vendors & Products The Gnu C Library
The Gnu C Library glibc

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Calling the ungetwc function on a FILE stream with wide characters encoded in a character set that has overlaps between its single byte and multi-byte character encodings, in the GNU C Library version 2.43 or earlier, may result in an attempt to read bytes before an allocated buffer, potentially resulting in unintentional disclosure of neighboring data in the heap, or a program crash. A bug in the wide character pushback implementation (_IO_wdefault_pbackfail in libio/wgenops.c) causes ungetwc() to operate on the regular character buffer (fp->_IO_read_ptr) instead of the actual wide-stream read pointer (fp->_wide_data->_IO_read_ptr). The program crash may happen in cases where fp->_IO_read_ptr is not initialized and hence points to NULL. The buffer under-read requires a special situation where the input character encoding is such that there are overlaps between single byte representations and multibyte representations in that encoding, resulting in spurious matches. The spurious match case is not possible in the standard Unicode character sets.
Title Static buffer overflow in deprecated nis_local_principal
Weaknesses CWE-127
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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: glibc

Published:

Updated: 2026-04-20T20:37:31.743Z

Reserved: 2026-04-08T22:47:29.814Z

Link: CVE-2026-5928

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-04-20T21:16:36.963

Modified: 2026-04-20T21:16:36.963

Link: CVE-2026-5928

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

Updated: 2026-04-20T22:45:20Z

Weaknesses