CVE-2018-19217 — In ncurses, possibly a 6

In ncurses, possibly a 6.x version, there is a NULL pointer dereference at the function _nc_name_match that will lead to a denial of service attack. NOTE: the original report stated version 6.1, but the issue did not reproduce for that version according to the maintainer or a rel

01What is this vulnerability?

In ncurses, possibly a 6.x version, there is a NULL pointer dereference at the function _nc_name_match that will lead to a denial of service attack. NOTE: the original report stated version 6.1, but the issue did not reproduce for that version according to the maintainer or a reliable third-party

02Affected products

No structured affected-product list available — see references below for vendor advisories.

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2018-11-12T19:29:00.597
• Last modified: 2026-07-23T18:58:25.760

09References

• bugzilla.redhat.com — https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1643753
• bugzilla.redhat.com — https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1643753