CVE-2026-6791
Description
When expanding paths that begin with a tilde (~) followed by a username, the internal parse_tilde function extracts the username to determine the user's home directory. The implementation allocates memory for this username directly on the stack using the strndupa macro. Because the size of this allocation was determined by the length of the user-supplied input without any bounds checks, passing an excessively long username e.g. thousands of characters, forces the thread to exhaust its stack space. Thus if an application passes untrusted, attacker-controlled input to the wordexp function, an attacker can trigger a stack clash.
Predictions
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.
Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here withsource_tier=community-verified.
OS impact
Debian Mixed 5 releases
| Version | Status | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| trixie | Affected | — |
| sid | Fixed | 2.43-3 |
| forky | Affected | — |
| bullseye | Affected | — |
| bookworm | Affected | — |
References
CWEs
CWE-121
Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.
Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.