VDB

CVE-2026-93990

CVE-2026-93990 PUBLISHED CVSS 8.7 HIGH

Reported by VulnCheck · Published September 19, 2026

Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.

Risk Scores

CVSS 4.0
8.7
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Affected Products

VendorProductVersions
libexpatlibexpat0, 2.8.5
alpineexpat0
libexpatlibexpat0, 0, 2.8.5
libexpat_projectlibexpat0

Timeline

  • Sep 19, 2026 CVE Published
  • Sep 20, 2026 EPSS Score
  • Sep 20, 2026 Coalition ESS Score
  • Sep 24, 2026 EPSS Score
  • Sep 25, 2026 EPSS Score
  • Sep 26, 2026 EPSS Score
  • Sep 28, 2026 CVE Updated
  • Sep 29, 2026 EPSS Score
  • Sep 30, 2026 Distribution Patch
  • Sep 30, 2026 Security Advisory
  • Sep 30, 2026 Distribution Patch
  • Sep 30, 2026 Security Advisory

References

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