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Fencer Vulns
high 8.8

CVE-2020-15888 json

Lua through 5.4.0 mishandles the interaction between stack resizes and garbage collection, leading to a heap-based buffer overflow, heap-ba…

published 2020-07-21 6 y ago modified 2026-09-08 2 mo ago also BIT-lua-2020-15888 , EUVD-2020-7862

cvss
8.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.4%
EPSS 2.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 84%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Lua through 5.4.0 mishandles the interaction between stack resizes and garbage collection, leading to a heap-based buffer overflow, heap-based buffer over-read, or use-after-free.

Patch / fix

  • bitnami lua 5.4.1
  • lua5.4 Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.4.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-15888

  • lua55 openSUSE Tumbleweed 5.5.0~beta1-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2025:15401-1

  • lua CBL-Mariner 2.0 5.3.5-11

azure linux advisories AZL-6670

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

  • lua Arch Linux 5.4.1-1

arch linux advisories AVG-1207

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-2020-15888 updated cvss 8.8

lua: stack resizes and garbage collection leads to heap-based buffer overflow

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 lua Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 lua Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 lua, lua-libs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 lua, lua-libs
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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

2.44% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 84% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • lua-users.org http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-07/msg00053.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • lua-users.org http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-07/msg00054.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • lua-users.org http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-07/msg00071.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • lua-users.org http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-07/msg00079.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 8.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
OSV 3.1 8.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
bitnami lua
>=5.4.0, <5.4.1
5.4.1

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.