CVE-2025-4516

high

Published 2025-12-17 · Modified 2025-12-22

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

8.0

Description

There is an issue in CPython when using `bytes.decode("unicode_escape", error="ignore|replace")`. If you are not using the "unicode_escape" encoding or an error handler your usage is not affected. To work-around this issue you may stop using the error= handler and instead wrap the bytes.decode() call in a try-except catching the DecodeError.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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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.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
rocky	8	fixed
sles		affected
debian	bookworm	fixed	`0`
debian	bullseye	fixed	`0`
debian	forky	fixed	`0`
debian	sid	fixed	`0`
debian	trixie	fixed	`0`

References

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

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