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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.3

CVE-2005-4872 json

Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library before 6.2 does not properly count the number of named capturing subpatterns, which allow…

published 2005-12-31 20 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2005-4863

cvss
4.3
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.3%
EPSS 2.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 83%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library before 6.2 does not properly count the number of named capturing subpatterns, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a regular expression with a large number of named subpatterns, which triggers a buffer overflow. NOTE: this issue was originally subsumed by CVE-2006-7224, but that CVE has been REJECTED and split.

Patch / fix

  • pcre3 Debian 12 6.2-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2005-4872

  • pcre RHEL 4 4.5-4.el4_5.4
  • pcre RHEL 5 6.6-2.el5_1.1

red hat advisories RHSA-2007:1052

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-2005-4872 updated

pcre incorrect memory requirement computation

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) pcre 6.6-2.el5_1.1 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS version 4 pcre 4.5-4.el4_5.4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) pcre 6.6-2.el5_1.1 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop version 4 pcre 4.5-4.el4_5.4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop Workstation (v. 5 client) pcre 6.6-2.el5_1.1 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 4 pcre 4.5-4.el4_5.4
    +1 more products
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS version 4 pcre 4.5-4.el4_5.4
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2007:1052

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

2.32% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 83% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

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.