Medium [CVE-2026-59857] Denial of Service via out-of-bounds write in spell sound-folding
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-59857 affecting Red Hat Hardened Images, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
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Summary
Vim is an open source, command line text editor.
Prior to 9.2.0725, the single-byte branch of spell_soundfold_sal() in src/spell.c translates a word through a spell file's SAL sound-folding rules into a caller-owned result buffer, but its result writes are guarded with reslen < MAXWLEN, allowing reslen to reach MAXWLEN before res[reslen] = NUL writes one byte past the end of the MAXWLEN-element stack buffer.
A boundary-length word passed to soundfold(), or reached via sound-based spell suggestion while a SAL-based spell language is active under a non-multibyte 8-bit encoding, can corrupt the eval_soundfold() stack frame and crash the editor. This issue is fixed in version 9.2.0725.
An out-of-bounds write vulnerability in Vim's spell_soundfold_sal() function allows an attacker to corrupt memory and crash the editor (Denial of Service) by supplying a specially crafted word during spell sound-folding. This Moderate impact flaw in Vim's spell sound-folding feature can lead to a denial of service.
This vulnerability primarily affects interactive users of the Vim text editor. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 5.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-787.
Affected products named by the advisory: Red Hat Hardened Images; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7; and 4 more.
- < 9.2.0725
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 10 days ago·verify at source
- 9.2.0725
- vim-main-9.2.780-1.hum1
- RHSA-2026:35387
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 10 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- This vulnerability can be mitigated by preventing Vim from automatically applying editor configurations embedded in files. Add the following line to the global /etc/vimrc or local ~/.vimrc configuration file: set nomodeline
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 10 days ago·verify at source
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