CVE-2025-15281
Published: 20 January 2026
Summary
CVE-2025-15281 is a high-severity Use of Uninitialized Resource (CWE-908) vulnerability in Gnu Glibc. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 21.1th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Vulnerability enables remote DoS via crafted input to wordexp triggering process abort on wordfree (CWE-908, A:H impact), directly mapping to application exploitation for endpoint denial of service.
NVD Description
Calling wordexp with WRDE_REUSE in conjunction with WRDE_APPEND in the GNU C Library version 2.0 to version 2.42 may cause the interface to return uninitialized memory in the we_wordv member, which on subsequent calls to wordfree may abort the process.
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2025-15281 is a vulnerability in the GNU C Library (glibc), affecting versions 2.0 through 2.42. It occurs in the wordexp function when invoked with the WRDE_REUSE flag in conjunction with WRDE_APPEND, causing the interface to return uninitialized memory in the we_wordv member of the wordexp_t structure. A subsequent call to wordfree on this structure may trigger a process abort. The issue is classified under CWE-908 (Use of Uninitialized Resource) with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H), indicating high severity primarily due to availability impact.
The vulnerability can be exploited remotely over a network by unauthenticated attackers with low complexity and no user interaction required. Exploitation involves crafting input that triggers the specific flag combination in an application using wordexp, leading to uninitialized memory exposure in we_wordv. This results in a denial-of-service condition when wordfree is called, as the process aborts due to invalid memory access.
Mitigation details are available in the referenced advisories, including the Sourceware Bugzilla entry at https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33814 and the oss-security mailing list announcement at http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/01/20/3, which discuss patches and workarounds for affected glibc versions.
Details
- CWE(s)