1.8
Low
CVE-2026-11979 libxml2 is vulnerable to multiple stack-based buffer overflows in the xmlcatalog utility when running in --shell mode
Description
libxml2 is vulnerable to multiple stack-based buffer overflows in the xmlcatalog utility when running in --shell mode. The usershell() function processes user input using fixed-size stack buffers without proper bounds checking. By supplying an overly long input line, an attacker can overflow internal buffers (command, arg, and argv) during input parsing. This results in memory corruption within the stack frame. Successful exploitation may cause a crash or potentially allow arbitrary code execution in the context of the xmlcatalog process. This issue has been fixed in the commit c2e233fc. NOTE: The maintainers of this project did not agree that this issue is a vulnerability and considered it a bug.
Affected products and versions
| Product | Affected versions | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| libxml2 2.15 | earliest → 2.15.3 | No fix stated |
Other CVEs of libxml2
The 15 CVEs of libxml2 →
CVE-2026-86144
In xinclude in libxml2 before 2.15.4, xmlXIncludeProcess and xmlXIncludeProcessTree do not propagate parseFlags
5.6
Medium
CVE-2026-86143
In xmlIO in libxml2 before 2.15.4, an inconsistency in xmlOutputWriteCallback and xmlBufUse causes negative lengths to…
6.9
Medium
CVE-2026-86142
In libxml2 before 2.15.4, there is a heap-based buffer overflow in xmlXPtrEvalXPtrPart because of xmlXPtrEval xpointer…
6.9
Medium
CVE-2026-86141
xmlregexp in libxml2 before 2.15.4 has a NULL pointer dereference in xmlRegNewParserCtxt after a strdup failure, i.e.,…
2.9
Low