Description

CERT Polska has received a report about vulnerability in GNU diffutils software and participated in coordination of its disclosure.

The vulnerability CVE-2026-53910: 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 was fixed in commit 9ff04d5b84743e331e80b589335a52c5480d1815.

Credits

We thank Michał Majchrowicz and Marcin Wyczechowski from AFINE Team for the responsible vulnerability report.