CVE-2026-93990
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk28th percentile - higher than 28% of all known CVEs
Summary
Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.
Risk Assessment
This can lead to improper processing of XML data, potentially resulting in application errors or bypass of security mechanisms.
Recommendation
Update the Expat library to version 2.8.5 or later.
Other vulnerabilities in Expat
See all- CVE-2022-25315Critical
In Expat (aka libexpat) before 2.4.5, there is an integer overflow in storeRawNames.
- CVE-2022-25314High
In Expat (libexpat) before 2.4.5, there is an integer overflow in copyString.
- CVE-2022-25236Critical
In xmlparse.c in Expat (aka libexpat) before 2.4.5, attackers can insert namespace-separator characters into namespace URIs.
- CVE-2022-25235Critical
In xmltok_impl.c in Expat (aka libexpat) before 2.4.5 lacks certain validation of encoding, such as checks for whether a UTF-8 character is valid in a certain context.
- CVE-2022-23990High
Expat (libexpat) before 2.4.4 has an integer overflow in the doProlog function. This may lead to improper XML parser behavior.
- CVE-2022-23852Critical
Expat (aka libexpat) before 2.4.4 has a signed integer overflow in XML_GetBuffer, for configurations with a nonzero XML_CONTEXT_BYTES.
- CVE-2022-22824Critical
The defineAttribute function in xmlparse.c in Expat (libexpat) before 2.4.3 has an integer overflow. This may lead to incorrect behavior of the XML parser.
- CVE-2022-22823Critical
The build_model function in xmlparse.c in Expat (libexpat) before 2.4.3 has an integer overflow. This may lead to incorrect behavior of the XML parser.
- CVE-2022-22822Critical
addBinding in xmlparse.c in Expat (aka libexpat) before 2.4.3 has an integer overflow.
- CVE-2021-45960High
In Expat (libexpat) before 2.4.3, a left shift by 29 or more bits in the storeAtts function in xmlparse.c can lead to realloc misbehavior, such as allocating too few bytes or only freeing memory.
Original NVD description (English source)
Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS