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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2026-1757

Medium
6.2/10

Summary

A flaw was identified in the interactive shell of the xmllint utility, part of the libxml2 project, where memory allocated for user input is not properly released under certain conditions. When a user submits input consisting only of whitespace, the program skips command execution but fails to free the allocated buffer. Repeating this action causes memory to continuously accumulate. Over time, this can exhaust system memory and terminate the xmllint process, creating a Denial-of-Service (DoS) condition on the local system.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-401 - Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)

'Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)' is a weakness that occurs when software doesn't effectively release allocated memory after it is used. If not addressed, this enables attackers to launch denial of service attacks (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected behavior resulting from low memory conditions.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published