Gnu · Gnu C Library · CVE-2026-5928
**Name of the Vulnerable Software and Affected Versions**
gnu C Library versions prior to 2.44
**Description**
Calling the ungetwc function on a FILE stream with wide characters encoded in a character set with overlaps between single byte and multi-byte character encodings can lead to an attempt to read bytes before an allocated buffer. This occurs due to a bug in the wide character pushback implementation ` IO wdefault pbackfail()` in libio/wgenops.c, which causes ungetwc() to use the regular character buffer `fp-> IO read ptr` instead of the wide-stream read pointer `fp-> wide data-> IO read ptr`. This may result in a program crash if `fp-> IO read ptr` is NULL or the unintentional disclosure of neighboring data in the heap. This issue requires a specific character encoding where single byte and multibyte representations overlap, creating spurious matches, a condition not present in standard Unicode character sets.
**Recommendations**
Update to a version newer than 2.43.