This page tracks the Ubuntu fix status. The vulnerability itself is described on the main CVE page. View CVE-2026-56288 →

UBUNTU-CVE-2026-56288

GNU patch is vulnerable to a NULL pointer dereference when processing a specially crafted unified-diff patch file. Improper handling of consecutive en...

Original description

The description as published by the source.

GNU patch is vulnerable to a NULL pointer dereference when processing a specially crafted unified-diff patch file. Improper handling of consecutive end-of-file newline markers can corrupt internal hunk (single block of changes in diff) data structures, causing the application to pass a NULL pointer to fwrite() during patch processing. An attacker can trigger this condition with a malicious patch file, causing the utility to crash and resulting in a denial of service. This issue has been fixed in the commit e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313

Source: OSV.dev (Open Source Vulnerabilities) OSV