CVE-2015-8391

critical
Published 2015-12-02 ยท Modified 2026-05-06
CVSS v3
9.8
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
9.8

Description

The pcre_compile function in pcre_compile.c in PCRE before 8.38 mishandles certain [: nesting, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
97%
Patch ETA
โ€”

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 โ€” if you've already worked around this in production โ€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

โœš Propose a mitigation on Community โ†’ Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

fedora Fedora Affected 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
22 Affected โ€”
redhat Red Hat Affected 7 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
7.7 Affected โ€”
7.6 Affected โ€”
7.5 Affected โ€”
7.4 Affected โ€”
7.3 Affected โ€”
7.2 Affected โ€”
7.0 Affected โ€”
debian Debian Fixed 2 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
bullseye Fixed 2:8.38-1
bookworm Fixed 2:8.38-1

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
pcrepcre{"endExcluding":"8.38"}8.38
php phpphp{"startIncluding":"5.5.0","endExcluding":"5.5.32"}5.5.32

References

CWEs

CWE-119

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

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