Vulnerability · Published Jul 29, 2026 · Assigned by CERT-PL
CVE-2026-56390Arbitrary Output Location Change in GNU Bison
Medium 4.6
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in Bison from GNU. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 7% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
GNU Bison improperly handles grammar‑defined output paths. Grammar directives such as %output and %header allow specifying file paths, which are accepted without restriction and override caller‑supplied output options. When processing attacker-supplied grammar, this behavior allows directing generated files to arbitrary writable locations on the filesystem, potentially overwriting existing files accessible to the Bison process. Maintainers of this project were notified about this vulnerability, and fixed the issue in commit 8d101c19d4d9aaedf83a448c925513742d4efcf0. However, they did not provide vulnerable version range. Version 3.8.2 was tested and confirmed as vulnerable, other versions were not tested but might also be vulnerable.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian:12 | bison | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-56390 |
| Debian:13 | bison | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-56390 |
| Debian:14 | bison | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-56390 |
| Ubuntu:22.04:LTS | bison | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-56390 |
| Ubuntu:24.04:LTS | bison | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-56390 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | bison | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-56390 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | bison | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-56390 |
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-73 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:L/SA:N