CVE-2016-3861

high

Published 2016-09-11 · Modified 2026-05-06

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CVSS v3

7.8

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

8.8

Description

LibUtils in Android 4.x before 4.4.4, 5.0.x before 5.0.2, 5.1.x before 5.1.1, 6.x before 2016-09-01, and 7.0 before 2016-09-01 mishandles conversions between Unicode character encodings with different encoding widths, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (heap-based buffer overflow) via a crafted file, aka internal bug 29250543.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

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 — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → 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.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-40354 remote android verified

Google Security Research · 2016-09-08

Google Android - libutils UTF16 to UTF8 Conversion Heap Buffer Overflow

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
debian	bullseye	fixed	`1:7.0.0+r1-4`

References

CWEs

CWE-119 CWE-264

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

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