CVE-2018-20786 — libvterm through 0+bzr726, as used in Vim and other products, mishandles certain

libvterm through 0+bzr726, as used in Vim and other products, mishandles certain out-of-memory conditions, leading to a denial of service (application crash), related to screen.c, state.c, and vterm.c.

01What is this vulnerability?

libvterm through 0+bzr726, as used in Vim and other products, mishandles certain out-of-memory conditions, leading to a denial of service (application crash), related to screen.c, state.c, and vterm.c.

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: 2019-02-24T14:29:00.283
• Last modified: 2026-10-15T18:17:19.910

09References

• github.com — https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/cd929f7ba8cc5b6d6dcf35c8b34124e969fed6b8
• github.com — https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/3711
• usn.ubuntu.com — https://usn.ubuntu.com/4309-1/
• github.com — https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/cd929f7ba8cc5b6d6dcf35c8b34124e969fed6b8
• github.com — https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/3711
• usn.ubuntu.com — https://usn.ubuntu.com/4309-1/