CVE-2019-20433 — libaspell

libaspell.a in GNU Aspell before 0.60.8 has a buffer over-read for a string ending with a single '\0' byte, if the encoding is set to ucs-2 or ucs-4 outside of the application, as demonstrated by the ASPELL_CONF environment variable.

01What is this vulnerability?

libaspell.a in GNU Aspell before 0.60.8 has a buffer over-read for a string ending with a single '\0' byte, if the encoding is set to ucs-2 or ucs-4 outside of the application, as demonstrated by the ASPELL_CONF environment variable.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

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: 2020-01-27T14:03:26.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-05T02:39:09.989Z

09References

• aspell.net — http://aspell.net/buffer-overread-ucs.txt