CVE-2026-56288NULL Pointer Dereference in GNU patch

Description

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

Data: CVE.org, NVD, CISA KEV, FIRST EPSS, Ubuntu. Published as the sources state it, in English.

Affected products and versions

References and patches

• https://cert.pl/en/posts/2026/07/CVE-2026-56288 third-party-advisoryThird Party Advisory
• https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/ productPatchProduct
• https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/commit/?id=e6d6a4e021660679d7fc9150f981d4920f722313 patchPatch