High [CVE-2026-55693] Out-of-bounds Write in Spell File Word Count

Vim is an open source, command line text editor. Prior to 9.2.0653, the tree_count_words() function in src/spellfile.c fills in the word-count fields of a spell-file word trie by walking it iteratively with a depth counter.

The counter is bounded only by the trie structure itself; it is never checked against the size of the fixed MAXWLEN-element stack arrays it indexes (arridx[], curi[], wordcount[]). A crafted.spl/.sug file pair, loaded when the user invokes spell suggestion, can drive the descent arbitrarily deep, so the function writes past the end of those arrays.

This is a stack out-of-bounds write that corrupts the call frame and crashes the editor. This vulnerability is fixed in 9.2.0653.

A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by tricking a user into loading a specially crafted spell file. This Moderate impact vulnerability in Vim's spell suggestion feature allows an attacker to cause a denial of service.

This requires user interaction and a malicious file, limiting its immediate exploitability. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 7.3 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:H).

Weakness: CWE-120.

Affected products named by the advisory: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 Extended Update Support; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9; Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.22; and 6 more.