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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.1

CVE-2019-20433 json

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…

published 2020-01-27 6 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-10981

cvss
9.1
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.7%
EPSS 1.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 77%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • gnu aspell 0.60.8
  • aspell Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 0.60.7-3

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2019-20433

  • aspell SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5, SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP5 0.60.6.1-18.8.2
  • php53 SLES 11 SP4-LTSS, SLE Point of Sale 11 SP3 5.3.17-112.79.1
  • php72 SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP5, SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP4, SLE Module for Web and Scripting 12 7.2.5-1.37.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2020:2807-1SUSE-SU-2020:14289-1SUSE-SU-2020:0397-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2019-20433 updated cvss 5.8

aspell: UCS-2 and UCS-4 null-terminated string handling OOB read

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 aspell
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 aspell Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 aspell
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.74% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 77% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 9.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.4 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.