Improper Handling of Unicode Encoding Affecting libexpat-devel package, versions <2.8.5-150400.3.40.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.4% (33rd percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES155-LIBEXPATDEVEL-20877018
  • published13 Oct 2026
  • disclosed12 Oct 2026

Introduced: 12 Oct 2026

NewCVE-2026-93990  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-176  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.5 libexpat-devel to version 2.8.5-150400.3.40.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream libexpat-devel package and not the libexpat-devel package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:15.5 relevant fixed versions and status.

Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1