CVE-2016-3191

critical
Published 2016-03-17 ยท Modified 2026-05-06
CVSS v3
9.8
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
9.8

Description

The compile_branch function in pcre_compile.c in PCRE 8.x before 8.39 and pcre2_compile.c in PCRE2 before 10.22 mishandles patterns containing an (*ACCEPT) substring in conjunction with nested parentheses, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (stack-based buffer overflow) via a crafted regular expression, as demonstrated by a JavaScript RegExp object encountered by Konqueror, aka ZDI-CAN-3542.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
97%
Patch ETA
โ€”

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or โ€” if you've already worked around this in production โ€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

โœš Propose a mitigation on Community โ†’ Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
suse slesaffected
debian debianbookwormfixed10.21-1
debian debianbullseyefixed10.21-1
debian debianforkyfixed10.21-1
debian debiansidfixed10.21-1
debian debiantrixiefixed10.21-1

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
pcrepcre8.00
pcrepcre8.01
pcrepcre8.02
pcrepcre8.10
pcrepcre8.11
pcrepcre8.12
pcrepcre8.13
pcrepcre8.20
pcrepcre8.21
pcrepcre8.30
pcrepcre8.31
pcrepcre8.32
pcrepcre8.33
pcrepcre8.34
pcrepcre8.35
pcrepcre8.36
pcrepcre8.37
pcrepcre8.38
pcrepcre2{"endIncluding":"10.21"}

References

CWEs

CWE-119

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

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