CVE-2015-8386

critical
Published 2015-12-02 · Modified 2026-05-06
CVSS v3
9.8
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v2
7.5
VIR risk
9.8

Description

PCRE before 8.38 mishandles the interaction of lookbehind assertions and mutually recursive subpatterns, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (buffer overflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
97%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: debian — https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2015-8386

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: cve@mitre.org — http://vcs.pcre.org/pcre/code/trunk/ChangeLog?view=markup

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
fedora fedora22affected
debian debianbookwormfixed2:8.38-1
debian debianbullseyefixed2:8.38-1

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
pcreperl_compatible_regular_expression_library{"endIncluding":"8.37"}
php phpphp{"startIncluding":"5.5.0","endExcluding":"5.5.32"}5.5.32

References

CWEs

CWE-119

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.