Medium [CVE-2026-53910] heap‑based buffer overflow due to multiple signed integer overflows in line‑mapping calculations
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-53910 affecting Red Hat Hardened Images, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
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Summary
diff3 tool from GNU diffutils is vulnerable to a heap‑based buffer overflow due to multiple signed integer overflows in line‑mapping calculations. Incorrect arithmetic in mapping line ranges can result in corrupted values being used for memory allocation and loop bounds.
When processing crafted diff output, these overflows may cause the application to allocate insufficient memory and subsequently perform out‑of‑bounds writes during internal processing.
An attacker who can control the output of the diff program used by diff3 (e.g. via --diff-program pointing to a malicious script) can trigger out-of-bounds writes, resulting in a crash and potentially remote code execution depending on the environment.
This issue has been fixed in commit 9ff04d5b84743e331e80b589335a52c5480d1815 NOTE: The project maintainers claim that this is not a security issue. They state that the worst outcome this issue can cause is a crash of diff and that it cannot be used to escalate privileges.
A flaw was found in the diff3 program in the diffutils package. An attacker often needs prior execution privileges to supply the malicious diff output, meaning they already have the ability to execute arbitrary scripts on the system.
Due to these reasons, this vulnerability has been rated with a low severity. Red Hat severity: Low — CVSS 5.3 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L).
Weakness: CWE-190.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 27 days ago·verify at source
- diffutils-main-3.12-6.1.hum1
- RHSA-2026:45327
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 27 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- To mitigate this vulnerability, do not run the diff3 program with untrusted input for the --diff-program argument or process untrusted diff output.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 27 days ago·verify at source
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