CVE-2012-3406

medium

Published 2014-02-10 · Modified 2026-04-29

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

6.8

Description

The vfprintf function in stdio-common/vfprintf.c in GNU C Library (aka glibc) 2.5, 2.12, and probably other versions does not "properly restrict the use of" the alloca function when allocating the SPECS array, which allows context-dependent attackers to bypass the FORTIFY_SOURCE format-string protection mechanism and cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted format string using positional parameters and a large number of format specifiers, a different vulnerability than CVE-2012-3404 and CVE-2012-3405.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

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OS impact

Red Hat Affected 2 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
6.0	Affected	—
5	Affected	—

Ubuntu Affected 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
12.04	Affected	—
11.10	Affected	—
11.04	Affected	—
10.04	Affected	—
8.04	Affected	—

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`2.19-14`
sid	Fixed	`2.19-14`
forky	Fixed	`2.19-14`
bullseye	Fixed	`2.19-14`
bookworm	Fixed	`2.19-14`

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions
gnu	glibc	`2.5`
gnu	glibc	`2.12`
redhat	enterprise_virtualization	`3.0`

References

CWEs

CWE-264

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.